In this delightfully readable work P. describes the history and culture of ancient Mesopotamia from its urban origins (c. 4000 bce) up to the fall of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great (331 bce). Yet unlike other historical surveys chronicling the passage of time mostly through achievements and events related to kings, this book tells the story of Mesopotamia's expansive history through the ordinary lives of individuals who hailed from many different social ranks and employments across the wide spectrum of society. To be sure, kings figure in this story – and their achievements and the events in which they took part help to move the story along through time –, but the book is largely held together by the remarkable stories of everyday people and their experiences. These stories are artfully narrated and animated by P.'s lively writing, and she is to be praised for her extensive research of archaeological remains together with her scrutiny of countless clay cuneiform tablets documenting Mesopotamian life in all its richness and complexity.
The mention of weavers in the title of the book highlights the importance of these actors in Mesopotamian society, and rightfully so; for when one reads through the ancient sources, these people are often present. The production of textiles from wool and linen was one of Mesopotamia's key industries throughout its long history, and weavers would have been kept busy making cloth and garments to maintain a healthy economy for the palace and temple institutions that employed them. Cuneiform documents from the earliest of historical periods provide testimony for this vibrant industry. P. describes, for example, the tablet archives of a temple workshop in Sumer managed by a queen by the name of Baranamtara, who lived around 2400 bce. Hundreds of mostly women weavers under her employ transformed massive bales of plucked wool and flax into gorgeous, finely embroidered garments and blankets. The prominence of women in this industry continued to the Old Assyrian period some centuries later, when women in the city of Assur were bent over their looms, endeavouring to fill the demands for cloth made by their merchant husbands, who were trading these garments in far-off Anatolia. One cuneiform letter manages to convey, across the divide of over 4,000 years, the tested patience of the Assyrian wife whose husband kept changing his requests for textiles, first demanding that they be reduced in size and then criticising them for being too small. When we move forward another 1,000 years, we learn that weaving was still an important industry in the cities of Assyria and Babylonia, where woollen, linen and cotton textiles were often being dyed in a stunning array of colours. We also read of the concern over keeping these beautiful garments clean, the job of laundering them being left to professional men and women who were hired on a yearly basis to keep their clients’ clothes regularly washed, being mindful to clean and ‘whiten the whites’. One cannot fail to be struck by the agelessness of these little sketches of life from the distant past that P. has skilfully drawn out of these myriad tablets. The desires, complaints and everyday concerns of people have not changed a great deal over the millennia.
It is fitting that that the book focuses on the lives and activities of those who were literate, given how indispensable they were to just about every facet of the social, religious and economic life of Mesopotamian cities. Scribes who could read and write had to document all types of economic transactions, legal dispositions, temple and palace properties, letters, employment rosters and payments. Yet, the training involved to become a scribe was hard work, as we know from the tablets of pupils such as Elletum, who spent many years in a scribal school in his home town of Nippur, making his way through a curriculum that would have included copying endless lists of people and professions, memorising multiplication tables, reciprocals, square roots and cube roots, learning geometry and the systems used for weights and measures, and studying model contracts and proverbs. More advanced scribes could go further in their education, learning and copying literary masterpieces like hymns to dead kings and tales about gods and heroes, including those of the famous king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, whose lessons learned about friendship, fame, kingship and the pleasures of everyday pursuits still manage to resonate with us today.
While these latter literary pursuits afforded a fortunate few scribes rewarding, intellectual diversions, the majority would have spent their time attending to the day-to-day documentation and management of what could often be a highly complex administrative system. P.'s thorough and thoughtful sketch of the life and activities of an Old Babylonian official named Shamash-hazir, known through scores of cuneiform tablets written to or by him, shows how complicated and genuinely stressful a scribe's occupation could be. As the overseer of the agricultural livelihood of a large province of Larsa in Babylonia, Shamash-hazir had to walk out to fields and pastures of his province on a regular basis, recording the names of their owners and tenants, measuring their borders with his surveyor, and bestowing gifts of available land to loyal servants on behalf of his overlord, king Hammurabi. Sometimes this harried official made mistakes, however, granting land that was already owned by someone else or moving too slowly to hire the necessary labour to dredge a silted-up water canal. Then Hammurabi, ever the micro-manager, would be on Shamash-hazir's case, chastising him for his errors and demanding greater attentiveness. The tablets revealing these exchanges are remarkable for their immediacy: while Shamash-hazir lived nearly 4,000 years ago, the pressures and anxiety of having to navigate such a complicated, demanding occupation still feel palpable to this day.
Drawing from archaeological and textual evidence of four millennia of Mesopotamian history, this is a weighty book of over 500 pages. The interested lay person, to whom this book is principally directed, may find it too unwieldy to curl up with or carry around. Students of Mesopotamian history may find electronic versions of individual chapters more appealing and will benefit greatly from P.'s extensive references to relevant, up-to-date sources. At the same time, they may lose out on the qualities that make this work so remarkable – the unending richness of humanity that can be extracted from countless tablets of clay and mudbrick ruins, and the enduring nature of the institutions that Mesopotamia's people conceived and maintained for thousands of years.
