Period, yes, but
fun too

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On Mesopotamia,
books are more fun than you think

If you like history, and specially the Middle East, you might like to get a historical atlas such as Historical Atlas of the Middle East by G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville and Lorraine Kessel and the Historical Atlas of the Holy land by Karen Farrington. Do not forget the Atlas of ancient Mesopotamia by Norman Bancroft Hunt.

Mesopotamia and the roads to Babylon
The country we now call Irak was once a series of kingdoms where writing was first developed. All along the rivers, agriculture was becoming efficient: the word Mesopotamia means between the rivers, where the soil is rich in alluvions and plants grow more easily. The need to count and evaluate property created the first mathematicians and inventors of geometry. So, we got the first schools! There was more food, so the population grew large and created big cities. And with big cities, sumptuous art, music, and the kind of surprisingly best modern comfort you could have five thousand years ago. With all these successes came the need to have more workers, forced labor and slavery practices. If it makes you think of the Southern United States recent past, yes, there is a pattern.
All of this, I guess, is what makes Mesopotamia sound dull compared to the mysteries of Ancient Egypt, and the Egyptian obsession with death. Me, I am interested in the study of the mechanisms of slavery throughout the ages. I am also all for comfort, mathematics, money, better food and better living : I vote for Mesopotamia. Belittle death!
There are every year a hundred times more books and novels about Egypt than about Mesopotamia. Similarly, we got more books about middle ages and medieval mysteries (think of the Da Vinci code and of Harry Potter) than about the much more interesting Renaissance. I guess it says something about humanity. But I know the way to change your mind.
First, read this book: Gods, Graves and Scholars (essential book); all the people I know who read it spent the night finishing it. It was written by Ceram (b. 1915) in 1949. It is a fascinating book on the first archeologists. I would like to quote a more recent book, because so much has happened since it was first published, but it is still one of the bests. One chapter is about the Flood and how it was discovered that several ancient cultures had legends of a great flood before the Bible.
The husband of Agatha Christie, the distinguished archeologist Sir Mallowan, wrote an interesting scientific paper about the occurences of floods in Mesopotamia in...well, I read it some 30 years ago and it was older than that. Floods, he said, were and are still frequent in Mesopotamia, and it is not rare to discover that a whole town of the past has been wiped out by a big flood. Then people rebuild on top of the ruins or just abandon the site.
It is important to understand that, at the end of the 19th century, a lot of people lost their faith because of this flood story: they were not ready to understand that God's revelation through people comes within the culture of these people (which is why there is no SUV in the bible). A good book on faith lost and found in the modernist period, now totally forgotten, is called Augustin ou le maitre est la, by Joseph Malegue. I could not find a translation in English, but I found a book referring to it, if you are into the subject:The Intellectual Hero. Studies in the French Novel 1880-1955 by Victor Brombert.
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You can now take a break and read Agatha Christie's novel Murder in Mesopotamia. It is set in recent times: Agatha went to Baghdad many times with her husband. She always carried her teapot all the way, from home to Baghdad, aboard the Orient Express. I love her for it!
I have not read, but I would like to read Day of the false king. A Novel of Murder in Ancient Babylon by Brad Geagley.
Do you know that the first letters ever written by women were written or dictated right there? They are fascinating to read, unhappily they have not been translated in English, only in French and without the comments and explanations you and I would need. And there is only one man in the whole world who could help you with this, because he is familiar with the site where these letters were unearthed. His name is Daniel E. Fleming. He is the author of Democracy’s ancient ancestors; Mari and early collective governance (essential book) You want to know what women wrote about when they first wrote? Ask the man, beg the man: he teaches at New York University.

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