2018 read #16: Mesopotamia by Gwendolyn Leick.

Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City by Gwendolyn Leick
315 pages
Published 2001
Read from September 10 to September 21
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

As a youngster, I had been enthralled by all the most ancient "civilizations," as they were defined by my brother's 6th grade social studies textbook: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River Valley. Egypt was the easiest to learn more about, which led me into a period of Egyptomania up until my tween years, but this was strictly because Egypt is far more ingrained in our pop history than any of the other river valley agricultural regions. The only other place young Rick discovered "information" relating to the Indus Valley, for example, was in a book about the Bermuda Triangle, and to this day I have only read one book that covered ancient China in any detail (and what a disappointing read it was). As Leick herself puts it in her preface, of the ancient civilizations, "Only Egypt, which is for us almost entirely defined by its morbid obsession with life after death, has continued to fascinate the public.... The Mesopotamian peoples... with their less spectacular art and crumbling mudbrick ruins, have no comparable place in the public imagination."

Which is an outright shame. My undergraduate career almost steered me into a future amid the pre-urban agricultural milieu of the Neolithic period, thanks to a research paper on the site of Tell Sabi Abyad, and to this day I feel an urge to tell each and every person I know how freakin' cool it is that town-dwelling people, supplied only with stone tools, had an advanced administrative system based on stamp-seals and counting tokens, long before the development of metallurgy or written language. The lack of popular interest in the ancient history and prehistory of Southwest Asia baffles me. This is where so many plant crops and animals were domesticated! This is where (so far as we know) people started living in substantial, permanent towns! The modern world, for better or for worse (and there's a lot to be said for both extremes), would not exist without the cultures of the Fertile Crescent. Yet your proverbial Patty and Joe just wanna gawk at mummies.

Even my undergrad years didn't teach me much about historical (as opposed to prehistoric) Mesopotamia. Leick's Mesopotamia fills a vital gap in my education; I only wish it were longer, more vividly written, and better supplied with charts, tables, plans, and illustrations. Leick spends a lot of time describing ancient floorplans when a sketch map would convey it far more clearly. That's more the fault of the publisher, however, and the amount of labor and ink they were willing to pay for; Mesopotamia, alas, remains a niche interest in America, even after nearly two decades of direct colonial occupation of the region.

One thing I was amazed to learn: The earliest cities qua cities in Mesopotamia, as represented in Leick's chronological organizational scheme by Eridu, were far more egalitarian, even democratic, than pop history had ever told me. Women and men held positions in society far more equal than they would hold over the ensuing 5500 years of urban civilization. There was little differentiation visible arising from wealth inequality, either. In Leick's telling, the idea of a city began as a cooperative, mutualist affair—something none of my cultural anthropology courses touched on, with their tidy narrative that agriculture correlates with emerging disparities in wealth and gender. The inequalities we associate with, well, all of written history crept in gradually, but Eridu, at least, sounds wonderful—an example that should be known throughout the urban societies of today..

Mesopotamia is an important and revelatory history, not just of the Land Between the Rivers but of the emerging concept of the city itself as a social body. I'd love for a fully updated edition of it to come out, double the length, offering a more sweeping panorama of its vast subject (and, naturally, supplied with way more tables and floorplans). In its present form, it left me wanting far more.