Henri Frankfort, who led the Oriental Institute’s excavations in Iraq, asks how the first civilisations arose and why they took such different forms. After a chapter on how ancient cultures should be studied and a survey of Near Eastern prehistory, he contrasts the city-states of Mesopotamia with the unified kingdom of Egypt, and considers how much early Egypt owed to Mesopotamia.
A short, lucid classic by one of the great archaeologists of the ancient Near East. Download the free EPUB.