Review Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, by Gwendolyn Leick

This is a bit out of my usual area. It had been sitting, as many things are wont to do, in my basket, and as I was clearing out the enormo-list of things to actually buy a handful of items there was a sale on. This new book was cut from about £12 to £4, so I decided to get it.

Through looking at ten cities in an approximately chronological order, from Eridu to Babylon, the settlements and civilisation of Mesopotamia are explained to the reader. There are various different peoples/cultures covered, such as Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians. I knew very little of this period (mostly the Persians under Cyrus replacing the Medes and conquering the entire area, which is touched on briefly at the very end) and the book begins with a somewhat prehistoric look which soon turns historical.

The name Mesopotamia means ‘between the rivers’, and the shifting course of the waters plays a major role in cities rising, falling, and rising again. The time periods involved are quite astonishing, literally thousands of years. Equally interesting is the shift from a potentially egalitarian society through to god-kings (in a broad sense, not dissimilar to what happened with Rome).

There are various particular terms which are always explained as they crop up, as are the various gods, which was very useful as I had no idea otherwise what many of them meant. Necessarily, there’s a lot of knowledge gaps with many uncertainties due to lack of evidence. In other areas, fortune preserved tablets which, upon discovery, revealed surprisingly detailed accounts of myths and historical events (or propaganda, perhaps).

I found it a very interesting book, and one good for people unfamiliar with the period.

Thaddeus

Review: After the Ice, by Steven Mithen

After the Ice covers human prehistory from 20,000 BC to 5,000 BC. This extends from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), covers the initial warming after the end of the Ice Age, the cold spike of the Younger Dryas, and the return of the warming trend.

Beyond the obvious warming and a vague fuzzy awareness of hunter-gathering giving way to farming, my knowledge of this sort of period was minimal at best.

It’s a global book, looking at every continent on Earth and charting, in some cases, the arrival of mankind (in the Americas), and the development of man, which varied quite a lot. It’s intriguing to see the differing advance of technology and the earliest establishment of towns (in the Middle East/Mesopotamia), and the intermediate phase between hunter-gathering and Neolithic farming that happened in Europe and elsewhere (the Mesolithic).

As interesting were common features, particularly cave art and the use of stone (mostly flint and obsidian).

The author’s approach was to combine a straightforward archaeological summary with the practical implications, telling these through plausible vignettes of an unseen time traveller, John Lubbock (named after a Victorian who wrote a related book), as he visits various places and times to see how people lived.

The book is quite large, just over 500 pages (beyond which lies the index etc), and later on some of the less distinctive places/locations do blend into one another somewhat.

The epilogue was very interesting, and I liked the credible alternative perspectives on GM crops (essentially, it could bugger biodiversity and cause extinctions, or cure world hunger) and other matters. Throughout the book there’s a general open-minded approach that avoids imposing a single view when there are plausible options or a lack of evidence.

Thaddeus