Paul Kriwaczek – Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization
A survey history of Mesopotamia from about 8,000 years ago until the sixth century B.C., with a special emphasis on Babylon, from its rise around 1800 B.C. to its collapse.
The chapters on cuneiform writing, commerce, the birth of trade, and the Sumerian education are especially fascinating. One of the most common archaeological finds are clay writing tablets that students used for practice. From these, we can glean much about how writing was taught, as well as what was taught. Another useful insight is that Mesopotamian language was a lot like ours. It depended heavily on context and inside cultural knowledge. In our time, a sign with a picture of a car can mean many things—a warning for pedestrians, or to mark a parking spot or a garage, and so on. Many cuneiform words were the same way. Their base-60 numbering system treated decimal places similarly—the only way to tell, say, 26 from 206 or 2,006 was context. One imagines this was grist for many a court case.
The famously severe legal codes of Hammurabi and other Mesopotamian figures had a similar lack of literalism. The more severe punishments, including a horrific precursor to Roman crucifixion, were either written down only to instill fear, or were carried out extremely rarely for the same reason. A Gary Becker-inspired economic analysis of how the severity and frequency of Mesopotamian punishments affected crime rates would make for an interesting historical study, though the data collection problems are rather obvious.
Inertia Wins! 