The book
Read the corpus, in order.
Five thousand five hundred years of Mesopotamian history, period by period, tablet by tablet, as one continuous text. Begin at the beginning, follow the thread.
The story of this book opens around 3300 BCE, when scribes at Uruk first pressed marks into wet clay, and closes with Alexander the Great's conquest in 330 BCE. Behind it lies ten thousand years of slow Neolithic village-building — the long gestation that produced the Sumerians. After it: two millennia during which the wedges meant nothing to anyone, until cuneiform was deciphered again in the 1850s. The Prologue and Epilogue tell those bookends.
Begin at the beginningWhere we are. What the world is. Who the Sumerians were.
7 chapters
- ch.024000 – 3100 BCEUruk Period
The birth of the city, the birth of writing.
2 tablets
- ch.032900 – 2334 BCEEarly Dynastic
City-states, kings, the first wars.
1 tablet
- ch.042334 – 2154 BCEAkkadian Empire
The world's first empire under Sargon.
1 tablet
- ch.052112 – 2004 BCEUr III · Neo-Sumerian
A bureaucratic golden age, the Code of Ur-Nammu.
2 tablets
- ch.062000 – 1600 BCEOld Babylonian
Hammurabi, the Epic of Gilgamesh, mathematics.
3 tablets
- ch.081600 – 1155 BCEMiddle Babylonian
The Kassite kings, international diplomacy.
1 tablet
- ch.10911 – 609 BCENeo-Assyrian
Empire, library, terror, scholarship.
1 tablet
5 periods not yet covered — chapters will appear here as tablets enter the corpus.
The long silence, the rediscovery, and the work that remains.