BETWEEN TWO RIVERS

Ancient history as reflected in objects discovered in a Mesopotamian ruin that may be the world’s earliest museum.

The eight artifacts the book discusses were discovered in the 1920s in the palace of Ennigaldi-Nanna, high priestess of Sin, the moon god of Ur. They run the range from the statue of an early king to the tablets used by young students learning cuneiform, the Mesopotamian writing system. The author, an honorary fellow in Assyriology at Oxford, puts each of the objects in the context of the daily life of the era when they were made. So we learn about a young scholar who left his toothmarks on the clay tablet he was using for his assignment, or a barkeeper whose furniture budget included a suspiciously large number of beds. The hundreds of thousands of surviving cuneiform documents include not only royal decrees and official documents but letters between ordinary people—two mentioned here are a wife asking her husband to come home and a merchant planning his route to dodge tax collectors. The Sumerians, Babylonians, and other peoples who lived in the era were highly conscious of history, drawing connections between themselves and their predecessors—sometimes more than 1,000 years earlier. Their literary achievements include the Epic of Gilgamesh (which the author tells her young daughter as a bedtime story). The era’s advances in astronomy and mathematics contradict any notion that these were primitive, unenlightened times. Still, as the chapter on a stone mace found in the museum makes clear, brutal warfare was a too-common part of life, then as now. A final chapter on the priestess in whose palace the museum was located shows the important and varied roles played by women in Mesopotamian society.

A highly readable introduction to an era of history that deserves to be better known.