45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Temples and gods ? Or Ziggurats and DIN.GIR ?, June 17, 2001
This review is from: Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Paperback)
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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35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A classic, July 27, 2000
This review is from: Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Paperback)
"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.
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic Introduction, March 23, 2003
This review is from: Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Paperback)
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.)
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