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Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization Revised Edition

by A. Leo Oppenheim (Author), Erica Reiner (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 35 ratings
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"This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria."—Edward B. Garside, New York Times Book Review

Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East.

Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun.

"To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written."—Leonard Cottrell, Book Week

"Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research."—Samuel Noah Kramer, Archaeology

A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.

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  1. ISBN-10
    0226631877
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0226631875
  3. Edition
    Revised
  4. Publisher
    University of Chicago Press
  5. Publication date
    September 15, 1977
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    5.25 x 1.24 x 8 inches
  8. Print length
    445 pages
  9. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; Revised edition (September 15, 1977)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 445 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0226631877
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226631875
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.28 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 1.24 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 35 ratings

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  1. A. Leo Oppenheim

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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
35 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

TOM
5.0 out of 5 stars very good condition as advertised
Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2021
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very good condition as advertised
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Nathan Sepulveda
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2015
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good book
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tepi
5.0 out of 5 stars Temples and gods ? Or Ziggurats and DIN.GIR ?
Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2001
ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA : Portrait of a Dead Civilization. 433 pp. Chicago & London : The University of Chicago Press, 1968 (1964). (pbk.)

The civilizational achievements of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians of Mesopotamia only started to become known over the course of the last century or so. For our new understanding of the past we have to thank archaeology, in particular for its discovery of many tens of thousands of baked clay tablets which have miraculously preserved the complex cuneiform writing system, languages, and literatures of the ancient Mesopotamians, and for the patient decipherment of these tablets and other cuneiform-bearing artefacts by a small and dedicated group of international scholars.

The literature on this subject today is vast, and much of it is accessible only to specialists. Of the studies that are generally available - such as those of A. Leo Oppenheim, Samuel Noah Kramer, and Thorkild Jacobsen - most tend to be aimed at a more scholarly type of audience, the kind of people who like detailed footnotes, precise references to sources, bibliographies, etc.,

Oppenheim's valuable study, which weighs in at a hefty 433 pages, contains all of these plus fifteen plates, three maps, a Chronology, a Glossary of Names and Terms, and an Index. As a distinguished scholar and linguist who spent more than thirty years studying the cuneiform tablets, he offers us a personal picture of the Mesopotamians of three thousand years ago which sums up all that the tablets have to tell us about the ancient civilizations of Babylon and Assyria.

His book is organized as follows - Chapter I : The Background; The Setting; The Actors; The World Around; II : The Social Texture; Economic Facts; "The Great Organizations"; The City; Urbanism; III - Historical Sources or Literature?; An Essay on Babylonian History; An Essay on Assyrian History; IV - Why a "Mesopotamian Religion" Should Not Be Written; The Care and Feeding of the Gods; Mesopotamian "Psychology"; The Arts of the Diviner; V - The Meaning of Writing; The Scribes; The Creative Effort; Patterns in Non-Literary Texts; Part VI - Medicine and Physicians; Mathematics and Astronomy; Craftsmen and Artists.

Of particular interest are Oppenheim's views on "religion" as set forth in Chapter IV. He tells us, for example, that : "The Immense ruins of the temple towers [i.e., ziggurats] of the large cities ... made Babylonia famous .... Yet even today we do not know the purpose of these edifices.... We do not know what they were for" (page 172).

This is a startling admission, since it calls into question pretty well everything that has been written about ancient Mesopotamia. If the "temples" shouldn't really be called "temples" since we don't know what purpose they served, what about the "gods" and the "myths" of the Mesopotamians? Do these also represent a distortion or misreading of the facts? Were the gods really gods? Were the myths merely fabrications? Was their literature literature, or was it history?

So far as I know, Oppenheim is one of the very few scholars who have had the courage to suggest that the conventional view of Mesopotamian history may be fundamentally in error.
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Ray Farmer
5.0 out of 5 stars A paradigm shift for Assyriology?
Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2005
"Ancient Mesopotamia" struck me as being a wake-up call to Assyriologists to get their act together regarding the study of Mesopotamia. In his preface and introduction, Oppenheim bewails the Western bias of Assyriology and its imminent fossilization if things didn't change. It seemed to me that the crux of Oppenheim's argument was that the field's emphasis on the humanities put undue focus on the surviving literary texts, which as he pointed out, make up only a tiny fraction of the cuneiform tablets that the ancients deemed worthy of collecting in their libraries. As a result, in our attempts to understand Mesopotamian culture, too much importance may have been placed on texts that were not even part of the "mainstream of tradition". Even if we ignore this difficulty, Oppenheim argued that using literary techniques to study these texts ignores the possibility that the tablets had an altogether different meaning for the ancient Mesopotamians than just "great literature".

Rather, Oppenheim suggested that Assyriologists should decipher tablets that would shed light on various cultural aspects such as the economy, trade, technology, and medicine. Doing this would lead to a more accurate impression of Mesopotamia in a way that the ancients themselves may have seen it. And this would also avoid the danger of Assyriology becoming a self-justifying field with only limited relevance to its namesake culture.

Although my review has focused on the author's views of his own field, most of the book itself deals with a broad survey of the culture and history of the Semitic-speaking peoples of Mesopotamia. After giving us his ideas at the beginning of the book on what the paradigm of Assyriology should be, Oppenheim proceeded to do a remarkable job of putting these ideas into practice in the rest of the book. Limited use is made of direct quotations from texts, since as the author put it, "Translated texts tend to speak more of the translator than their original message". Additionally, some of the author's thoughts on the Mesopotamians are different from others in the field. For example, in describing the Code of Hammurabi and other publicly displayed law codes, Oppenheim speculated that they were meant to serve as the king's acknowledgement of social injustice and his vision of how things should be. In other words, the law codes were meant to be statements of the king, not necessarily a collection of laws to be enforced.

I felt that "Ancient Mesopotamia" provides an excellent narrative of the history, culture, and religion of this civilization, and would be well-regarded by those who have an interest in this time and place. I am not an Assyriologist and I have only limited knowledge of the impact that Oppenheim may have had on the field, but I would also suggest that this book does a good job of marking the evolutionary development of Assyriology as it occurred up to the 1960's.
13 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Lalngaihawma Chawngthu
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in India on July 5, 2018
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Little boring to read.
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Paul J. Collier
3.0 out of 5 stars a great study
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 20, 2014
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A great study, however a little stodgy and it took a while to get through it, but a must for students of Sumerian history
2 people found this helpful
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