Ancient Near East: The Basics.

AuthorPodany, Amanda H.
PositionBook review

Ancient Near East: The Basics. By DANIEL C. SNELL. London: ROUTLEDGE, 2013. Pp. xiii + 161, illus. S21.95 (paper).

Routledge has, for more than a decade, been publishing a series of small volumes on "The Basics," of which the book under review is a recent addition. According to the publisher, "The Basics is a highly successful series of accessible guidebooks which provide an overview of the fundamental principles of a subject area in a jargon-free and undaunting format. Intended for students approaching a subject for the first time, the books both introduce the essentials of a subject and provide an ideal springboard for further study."

Surprisingly, the Ancient Near East is one of the first historical eras to be recognized with a volume in the series, and this book is the first to address any field of ancient history. Daniel C. Snell, an Assyriologist and biblical scholar at the University of Oklahoma, is eminently qualified to undertake the difficult task of compressing 8000 years of the history of the Near East and Egypt (from the beginning of agriculture to Alexander the Great) into less than 150 pages, in a way that is accessible to a general reader or undergraduate. Several of his previous books have been successful in presenting ancient Near Eastern history to a wider audience. He is to be commended for this since, as Snell himself notes, "the field of popularization [of the ancient Near East] has been too often left to journalists and others with no immediate knowledge of the texts, art, or architecture involved" (p. 130).

The book begins with a description of a conversation in 1967 when a young scholar (presumably the author) became aware of the "long view" of history in the Middle East. This episode is, curiously, written in the second person ("And you remember the first Middle Eastern war you paid attention to, back in 1967, when you were a freshman in college...," p. 1), which might strike undergraduate readers as unusual, but may well get their attention. The rest of the chapter aims to define "What we mean when we talk about the ancient Near East."

The chronological narrative is covered in the next three chapters. Chapter 2 addresses all ancient Near Eastern history from 8000 to 2000 B.C.E., chapter 3 is devoted to the second millennium B.C.E., and chapter 4 to the first millennium B.C.E. These are followed by short chapters on literature and art, then a more detailed chapter on the legacies of the ancient Near East, followed...

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