Civilizations of Ancient Iraq.

• Author: Podany, Amanda H.
• Position: Book review

By Benjamin R. Foster and Karen polinger Foster. Princeton: Princeton university press, 2009. Pp. xii + 297, illus. $26.95.

Civilizations of Ancient Iraq opens a window into ancient Mesopotamian history for readers who are interested in learning more about the civilization itself as well as about the losses to cultural heritage in Iraq that have occurred both recently and in the past. The book is the work of Benjamin R. Foster, who is Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature at Yale University and Curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, and Karen Polinger Foster, who is also a faculty member at Yale University.

With this book the authors have, in a way, written several works. One is an excellent overview of Mesopotamian history and archaeology from prehistoric times to 637 C.E. that is at once broad in scope and detailed in the evidence presented. This the authors achieve in just 210 pages. They make a strong case for "Mesopotamia's central role in the development of human culture" (to quote the blurb on the book jacket).

The second is an essay on the appalling impact of looting and illegal excavation on Iraq's sites, museums, and antiquities. This essay is spread out across the captions to the twenty-two illustrations and includes the effects of the current war as well as earlier examples of mistreatment of objects and architecture. It concludes in the last pages of the epilogue to the book, in which the authors draw a devastating portrait of the loss and destruction of cultural heritage that have resulted from the Gulf and Iraq Wars. In many ways this seems to have been the motivation behind the authors' creation of the book. Perhaps, if more people become aware of the importance of Mesopotamian culture, more would be done to try to prevent its loss. The last paragraph of the book is worth quoting in full:

Despite these and other national and international efforts, the cultural heritage of Iraq is vanishing at a rate without precedent or parallel. Numerous important sites have been utterly destroyed, records and artifacts lost forever. But the devastation affects far more than ancient Iraq alone, for what is gone beyond recovery is our common human past. (p. 210) The third work within the Fosters' book is a large collection of excerpts from primary sources of all types, many of them unfamiliar to a general reader or not otherwise translated into English. For example, in the sixteen pages of chapter 5, the authors have...