Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia

Abstract

The civilisation of Ancient Mesopotamia flourished between 3300 BC and 2000 BC in the southern half of the lands between and either side of the Tigris and Euphrates, where a vast grain harvest (about equal to Canada's today) supported a large and well-ordered population. The early development of cuneiform writing, the world's first phonetic script, means that, for the first time in the history of humanity, it is possible to learn something of how people thought and felt. This book aims to do just that and, as the reader soon finds out, succeeds triumphantly. It takes the reader on a voyage of discovery into the public and private realms of the lives of our first civilised ancestors – their cooking and eating, feasts and festivals, wine and drinking, love and sex, what women could do and what they could not, magic and medicine, trial by ordeal, life in a palace above and below stairs, astrology and divination, gods and religion, and literature and myth.

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