The Archaeology of Mesopotamia

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Ancient Mesopotamia, the “valley of the twin rivers,” Tigris and Euphrates, was the cradle of civilization in the Near East. Here, among the Sumerians, the earliest experiments were made in writing and mathematics, organized religion and the communal administration of city-states. For over a century, archaeologists have sought to uncover remains of the first human settlements and the great towns into which they later developed. Today, several thousand books and articles concerned with the archaeology of Mesopotamia are in existence, yet curiously no recent attempt has been made until this present study to provide an up-to-date synthesis of their conclusions. The chronological sweep extends from the Stone Age down to the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great in 539 BC, taking in the pre-dynastic millennia, the rise and fall of Sumer and Akkad, Hammurabi’s united kingdom, Assyria, and the empire which it bequeathed to the later Babylonian kings. Professor Lloyd’s method is to analyze systematically the wealth of material produced by major and minor excavations since 1900 and the developments thus revealed in the realms of art, architecture, religion and social history. For the revised edition the text has been updated throughout, incorporating an account of recent discoveries and expanded notes and bibliography.