They Wrote on Clay - Edward Chiera

This is about ancient civilizations in the Tigris-Euphrates region. Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and the like. However, the book is a lot older than I thought at first glance - originally published in 1938 - so Chiera talks about the discovery of King Tut's tomb as a relatively recent occurrence, and that archaeology itself is a new science. Leaves me wondering how much of what's discussed here has been debunked or reinterpreted in the intervening decades.

One thing people in that part of the world did that works out fairly well for archaeologists, is they used clay. The fire-baked clay apparently lasts very well, but even the ones that were simply sun-dried (as fire-baking bricks was apparently expensive and time-consuming) last a long time. And in addition to being used for building materials, clay was also used as a writing surface (hence the title.) Which means, as archaeologists excavate, they find a wealth of information written down about business, law, religion, political communications (he notes at one pint an excavation in Egypt found correspondence between a pharaoh and a king of the Hittites, and that's how archaeologists and historians figured out the Hittites were a much bigger deal than they previously thought), the great sagas of the culture.

Once they're able to translate the writing, that is, and Chiera discusses not only how that came about, but also what was the notion for how the writing style developed from using pictures, to more simplified pictures that could be easily drawn with a reed stylus, to a series of line, to eventually, an alphabet. Again, I have no idea if the progression he puts forth here still holds, but he lays it out in a way that makes sense of something I'd never spent much time considering.

Chiera's pretty good at giving the overview of how certain aspects of society worked, and what evidence it's based on, and then maybe delving into specific examples. He spends most of a chapter on what they learned about a single family, Tehiptilla, based on a vast collection of clay tablets spanning generations found in the remains of a place called Nuzi. How you can track their business dealings, as well as the legal, but not ethical business practices. There's an entire deal built around landlords making their tenants essentially name them in their wills. But historians can also trace the shift in local power as one invading army rolls through, and then another later on.

Overall, this is a pretty good starting point if someone were wanting to learn more about the ancient cultures in that region. It covers enough different aspects of life in those places and times to get a sense of what might interest you, and it's an old enough work you can probably find books devoted to whichever specific topic interested you most that have greatly expanded on what's known.

'And so we may have first the unknown settlement, then a Sumerian city, then a Babylonian city, and thereafter continue through the Persian, Greek, Parthian, Sasanian, and Moslem Strata. We may even find a medieval town above these, and then on the very top the existing modern city: "The Hill of the Seven Cities." But the city is always the same; it is only the people who change.'