The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: From the Old Stone Age to the Persian Conquest

Revised Edition. — Thames and Hudson, 1984. — 251 pp.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 ВС, taking in the predynastic 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.During a career of thirty-five years in the Near Eastern field, Seton Lloyd excavated a score of important sites, including several in Mesopotamia. Among his many books dealing with the archaeology of this area are Art of the Ancient Near East, Foundations in the Dust (recently reissued in a revised edition by Thames and Hudson) and Mounds of the Ancient Near East. He has been successively Archaeologies Adviser to the Iraq Government (1959-49), Director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (1949-61) and Professor of Western Asiatic Archaeology in the University of London (1962-69).The Land and its Rivers.The Twilight of Neolithic Man.The Threshold of Written History.Pre-literate Peoples of Northern Mesopotamia.The Early Sumerian Dynasties.Pre-Sargonid Art and Architecture.The Dynasty of Akkad and the Sumerian Revival.The 2nd Millennium BC.The Late Assyrian Period.Babylon: The Last Mesopotamian Monarchy.