Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization

Rating:
Summary: A paradigm shift for Assyriology?
Review: "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.




Rating:
Summary: A classic
Review: "Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilisation" is a classic among Mesopotamian Literature. The book deals with every passionate detail of the civisation between the rivers. Oppenheim covers enviromental factors in the creation of civilisation in Mesopotamia, urban life, interesting issues in there religion, and also the beginning of written literature in the Mesopotamian region. Oppenheim's book is more for the advanced reader of Mesopotamian culture, so it is not suggested for the beginner in the study of Mesopotamian history. However, I do recommend it for the library of anyone who is a avid enthusiast into Mesopotamian literature, history, and achaeology.

Rating:
Summary: Lively, Insightful and Wide-Ranging
Review: A. Leo Oppenheim's "Ancient Mesopotamia:Portrait of a Dead Civilization" is one lively read. It is not a chronologically arranged history, (you'll have to go to Georges Roux's "Ancient Iraq" for that), but it is an unusually comprehensive series of essays on aspects of ancient Mesopotamian civilization. After introducing Assyriology as a discipline, Oppenheim situates Mesopotamia geographically and culturally within the ancient world, and discusses its relations with and influence on its neighbors. From there he goes on to analyze the root forms of almost everything we know of as civilization: urbanism, political and social organization, religion, writing, literature, and scientific thought. Particularly interesting are the discussions on the care and feeding of the gods, ancient psychology, and the scribal subculture. Throughout the book, Oppenheim refers to historical and literary data of every sort in an even-handed way. A helpful chronology, glossary, notes, and index fill the final 100+ pages of the book. Illustrations and maps could be a little better, but that's small change in a book of this scope. Come visit the impossibly exotic, yet oddly accessible, past

Rating:
Summary: Lively, Insightful and Wide-Ranging
Review: A. Leo Oppenheim's "Ancient Mesopotamia:Portrait of a Dead Civilization" is one lively read. It is not a chronologically arranged history, (you'll have to go to Georges Roux's "Ancient Iraq" for that), but it is an unusually comprehensive series of essays on aspects of ancient Mesopotamian civilization. After introducing Assyriology as a discipline, Oppenheim situates Mesopotamia geographically and culturally within the ancient world, and discusses its relations with and influence on its neighbors. From there he goes on to analyze the root forms of almost everything we know of as civilization: urbanism, political and social organization, religion, writing, literature, and scientific thought. Particularly interesting are the discussions on the care and feeding of the gods, ancient psychology, and the scribal subculture. Throughout the book, Oppenheim refers to historical and literary data of every sort in an even-handed way. A helpful chronology, glossary, notes, and index fill the final 100+ pages of the book. Illustrations and maps could be a little better, but that's small change in a book of this scope. Come visit the impossibly exotic, yet oddly accessible, past

Rating:
Summary: Lively, Insightful and Wide-Ranging
Review: A. Leo Oppenheim's "Ancient Mesopotamia:Portrait of a Dead Civilization" is one lively read. It is not a chronologically arranged history, (you'll have to go to Georges Roux's "Ancient Iraq" for that), but it is an unusually comprehensive series of essays on aspects of ancient Mesopotamian civilization. After introducing Assyriology as a discipline, Oppenheim situates Mesopotamia geographically and culturally within the ancient world, and discusses its relations with and influence on its neighbors. From there he goes on to analyze the root forms of almost everything we know of as civilization: urbanism, political and social organization, religion, writing, literature, and scientific thought. Particularly interesting are the discussions on the care and feeding of the gods, ancient psychology, and the scribal subculture. Throughout the book, Oppenheim refers to historical and literary data of every sort in an even-handed way. A helpful chronology, glossary, notes, and index fill the final 100+ pages of the book. Illustrations and maps could be a little better, but that's small change in a book of this scope. Come visit the impossibly exotic, yet oddly accessible, past

Rating:
Summary: Temples and gods ? Or Ziggurats and DIN.GIR ?
Review: 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. Another is Zechariah Sitchin. My advice would be to read both.

Rating:
Summary: Temples and gods ? Or Ziggurats and DIN.GIR ?
Review: 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. Another is Zechariah Sitchin. My advice would be to read both.

Rating:
Summary: Classic Introduction
Review: Georges Roux's outstanding book on ancient Iraq - which opens my eyes - seems amateurish compared to this one - probably the single best introduction to ancient Mesopotamia written in the English language.

Iraq's civilization is interesting for two reasons. From a purely archaeological/anthropological point of view, ancient Mesopotamia is by far the oldest civilization on this planet - even older than Egypt. The reasons why there's much less attention to it than to Egypt are the fact that there are so few monumental structures remaining there and the fact that Egypt is closer to the Graeoco-Roman civilization.

The other reason why Iraq's civilization is interesting is its potential importance IN THE FUTURE. With the war's outcome almost certain (truly it's like an Iron Age army crushing a Stone Age one), Iraq's long term prospects are quite good. Sitting on the second largest proven crude oil reserves in the world, Iraq has the potential to wield much influence, like Saudi Arabia.

Useful (but rather short) bibilography and glossary.

Oppenheim regrets not being able to make this book "twice the size of the present one." (p.334) I only regret that this book ISN'T three times as long. If this book isn't flying off the shelves, it should be. Get it before it's too late.

(Warning: This book does not include the Sumerian civilization, as the author makes explicit. For this subject you must turn to Sam N. Kramer.)

Rating:
Summary: more racism whats next, white ppl come from a differ planet
Review: This is just another sad attempt to put Euro-asia ahead of Africa. The reason why there are not a lot of artifacts which would show that mesopotamia is older than Eypt is the same reason why a few racist moronic (pretend) scholars would go out of their way to make up false claims. For the record, migration started from Africa to Euro-Asia and before then, Africa had already produced its pyramids in its mother country of Nubia, or Sudanic territory (black negroids), and its agriculture through out the continent. Come on ppl lets get beyond ones short comings, besides, there is more validation for hinduism coming from the iranian aryans. Who in turn receive their influences from the contact of African so called animist, which in fact is the belief that everything is the supreme source in a loop sequence of vibrating which is believe to be the only way the sun gods, rock gods, animal gods, human gods(neteru), etc., can exist. It was the greeks,iranian aryans who took this knowledge out of context, as they were the ones who were truly polytheistic in their beginning, as they treated there different gods as seperate beings who existed independant of one another. Hindu, and greek mythology went through a change once the invading Europeans were reeducated by the Egyptians, and Dravidians influences which in the beginning they were accused of being inferior civilizations with lame gods, but more likely it was just the ignorant outside view, as proved. Mesopotamians were a combination of African negroids (Sudanic-Nubians), Mediterranean Indo-Euro's, and pre-nomadic Arabs(the offspring of different ethnic groups). The teachings were concentrated around the African stories of civilization from beings of a different world which can be dated earlier in African stories throughout South Africa spreading up to the later north, east, and central migrations. The Ancient Africans claim to have gotten their knowledge about space-time, geometrics of objects, and consciousness being absolute, from these beings, inwhich the universe was said to exist psycho-physically, from a supreme being that was absolute conscious reality. Not all Africans societies receive the exact same knowledge so this is why it varies, other reasons were do to fueds domestically and abroad. There is no evidence that Mesopotamians invaded South Africa and brought there knowledge and stories with them of e.t visitors, but the migration from Africa to Euro-Asia supports the latter. The sad truth is the more that white racist try to seperate themselves from their source they will only reveal it more.

Rating:
Summary: A revolutionary view from a revolutionary scholar
Review: Without any doubt, this book is one of the most comprehensive works on ancient Near Eastern cultures with its distinguished structure and unique style. Mr Oppenheim, a well-known Assyrologist of the sixties, provides us a brief but deep and highly detailed portrait of Ancient Mesopotamia, as the subtitle of the book suggests ("Portrait Of A Dead Civilization".) First, I have to inform the enthusiastic reader that this is not a book for "beginners" - it requires a background on ancient history and an acquaintance with Mesopotamian civilizations. But you don't have to be a specialist or a scholar to enjoy the unique taste of the book.

While Samuel Noah Kramer's works feed us with the Sumerian part of Mesopotamian culture, Oppenheim focuses the main axis on Babylonia and Assyria. The book is not a plain history textbook in a chronological order. Oppenheim presents the "portrait" under well-designed chapters with essential concepts: The first chapter of the book is an overview on Mesopotamia. Then in the second chapter, Oppenheim leads us to the depths of urbanism, social texture and economical facts of the region in ancient times. Chapter 3 deals with the difference of "historical sources" and "literature" in Mesopotamia, and presents two essays on Assyrian and Babylonian history. The next chapter is, about ancient Mesopotamians' relations with their "gods": Oppenheim discusses why a "Mesopotamian Religion" should not be written. (According to my opinion, this is one of the most important parts of the book which underlines the "revolutionary" nature of the work.) The last two chapters deal with "the writing" and "science" in Mesopotamia, respectively. J. A. Brinkman's "Mesopotamian Chronology of the Historical Period" is presented as an appendix at the end of the book.

Leo Oppenheim's "Ancient Mesopotamia" is definitely one of the most important sources for intellectuals interested with the subject. Note that it is not just a "reference work" but a "book with a soul".