Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia

The civilization of Ancient Mesopotamia flourished between 3300 BC and 2000 BC in the southern half of the lands between and to 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.Jean Bottéro and his colleagues take the reader on a voyage of discovery into the public and private realms of the lives of our first civilized ancestors – their cooking and eating, feasts and festivals, wine and drinking, love and sex, what women could do and what they couldn’t, magic and medicine, trial by ordeal, life in a palace above and below stairs, astrology and divination, gods and religion, and literature and myth.

Jean Bottéro is Director of Studies and Professor of Assyriology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. His books include La Religion babylonnienne (1952), and Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning and the Gods (University of Chicago Press, 1992). Apart from being France’s leading Assyriologist, he is also a distinguished chef.