History of the Ancient Near East: Ca. 3000-323 Bc (Blackwell History of the Ancient World, 1)

Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece of Mesopotamia
Review: Marc Van De Mieroop, Professor in the Departments of History and Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, New York guides you through a substantial era in the ancient Near East, 3000 to ca. 323 B.C. Van De Mieroop speaks in a grandfatherly tone--authoritative, familiar, stern--and yet with a twinkle in his eye and the precision of a surgeon's scalpel which keeps you leaning forward on the edge of your seat.

Granted, the book reads as a college textbook, and indeed is the compilation of xeroxed notes used for an introductory undergraduate class on the ancient history of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Nonetheless, Van De Mieroop is a spectacular lecturer. He presents the reader with textual and archaelogical data, and how these contribute to our understanding of the history, but he does NOT bore the reader to death with an analyis of every single shard found at every obscure excavation site. Still, Van De Mieroop doesn't rush things--he is an authoritative expert in his field and, even if this is only an introductory textbook, he still offers the readers dazzling pearls of information.

This book's main strengths are two-fold: 1)It reads not like a history book; that is, a book of King A who was replaced by King B who was assassinated by King X, etc--but, like a novel. The suspense builds, and you have to keep yourself in check and not flip over to Chapter 13: Assyria's World Domination until you get to that part and 2)Van De Mieroop emphasizes the "big picture" before looking at the details. To Van De Mieroop, the drama in the Near East involved many actors with many different parts to play, and you can be assured that he will describe what those parts were to the best of his ability.

In summary, this is an indispensable book for the ancient Near East aficionado which I whole-heartedly recommend. With it one will gain a sturdy conceptual framework of the ancient Near Eastern period which will buttress further study if one so desires.