Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations.

• Author: Bahrani, Zainab
• Position: Review

By D. T. POTTS. Ithaca: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997. Pp. xx + 366, illustrations. $67.50.

At a time when Near Eastern archaeologists are looking into the "construction" of the discipline and its discursive practices and are turning away from the teleological notion of the "firsts" of civilization, Daniel Potts' Mesopotamia can be heralded as yet another Mesopotamian "first." Although the author does not claim to present a theoretically based investigation or to incorporate discourse analysis in his study, this book succeeds in exactly these areas. Potts describes the book as "my Mesopotamia," rightly pointing out that there are many ways of representing the past. Instead of offering his interpretation as the only accurate and correct image of Mesopotamian antiquity, he agrees that all scholarship is affected by the personal interests and preferences of the scholar. While others write about religion, literature, and political ideology, Potts chooses to write about "soil and water, or rope and planks, or barley and water buffalo" (p. 302).

This book surveys Mesopotamia by using a mass of archaeological, textual, paleontological, botanical, and other data which represent the material culture of the inhabitants of the southern half of what is now Iraq. It deals with their food and drink, pots and pans, houses, clothes, valuable and every day utensils. Potts combed through an enormous amount of literature to find out what the people could or could not have had around them in their daily lives. He firmly disposes of the myth that the area is poor in natural resources, an assertion often repeated to explain Mesopotamian expansion, from the Uruk to the Neo-Assyrian periods. When reading this book, we learn about the large variety of available resources, and discover what the inhabitants of the area were able to do with them. While we have long known that the Mesopotamians conquered and traded for precious minerals and woods, we discover here the extent to which the civilization was also built with locally available stone, clay, and timber.

The remarkable aspect of Mesopotamian Civilization is that Potts is willing to combine data thought to belong to different academic disciplines and to be of concern to distinct specialists. In his final chapter, "Some Reflections," he urges us to practice "lateral thinking." Archaeologists need to know what ancient texts say about the materials they excavate; when interpreting the textual record, philologists...