Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has always received less attention from scholars and the general public than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East.

A. Leo Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. At the time of his death in 1974, Oppenheim was working on revisions of the manuscript that, with the help of Erica Reiner, who used the author’s revision outline, completed the work that became this book. In the decades since, it has become the definitive work on Ancient Mesopotamia.