empiricism of the age and, at the other extreme, by its connection to the Bible. For generations of people steeped as much in biblical history as they were in pagan art (the Elgin marbles had arrived a generation earlier), the Assyrian reliefs showing Sennacherib’s siege of Lachish and King Jehu prostrating himself before Shalmanesser III brought the Bible vividly to life as no previous discoveries had done, and each new shipment of finds was assured a sensational reception as they arrived at the British Museum. Layard’s account of his excavations, Nineveh and its Remains (1849; popular edition 1851), became a railway-stand bestseller. Its 8,000 sales in 1849, he boasts in one letter, “will place it side by side with Mrs Rundell’s Cookery.” Bible fever reached its climax with George Smith’s discovery at the British Museum in 1872 of the “flood tablet” from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, bearing an account of the “Babylonian Noah,” Utnapishtim. Smith had little trouble securing support from the Daily Telegraph for an expedition to Nineveh to find the missing portion of the tablet.

The biblical origin of the flood story was only one of a series of such firsts that established Mesopotamia in the scholarly consciousness as the original source of civilization: the first writing, a complex society, the presence of cities, bureaucracy, a primitive democracy, monumental art, and much else. On its periphery lay the fertile crescent, the source of the first agriculture and animal husbandry, or so it was long believed. Ex Oriente Lux (oscar montelius; vere gordon childe)—from this heartland of invention many of the key developments in technological, social, and political evolution were thought to have radiated out, illuminating Europe and other areas of the old world with the benefits of civilized life. Although many of these ideas have been much modified and their naïve diffusionism tempered, Mesopotamia’s status as a source of “origins” remains. Text books on world archaeology inevitably (and rightly) cite Sumer’s role as a precociously early complex society, which had a significant impact on its neighbors and arguably on the early course of old world history as far afield as China.

The most successful integration of Mesopotamian evidence into a continental and global perspective has been in prehistory, for which the exclusively archaeological data is directly accessible to researchers from other regions and cultures. With the historical periods, on the other hand, an enormous weight of historical and textual evidence, requiring a familiarity with a number of ancient and modern languages, has tended to insulate Mesopotamia from cross-disciplinary analysis; where it has been attempted, such analysis has tended to yield superficial and unreliable results. The continuing divide between text-based Assyriologists and artifact-based archaeologists represents a further barrier to synthetic interpretation. Unlike classical archaeologists and Egyptologists, few Mesopotamian archaeologists can claim more than a working grasp of the textual evidence—and few Mesopotamian philologists and linguists can claim a strong grasp on the archaeological evidence. Some scholars have attempted to integrate the material and textual data, but very few have made significant original contributions in both fields. Moreover, within Assyriology itself the discipline is increasingly split into temporal and cultural specialisms corresponding to the main textual corpuses: Archaic, E.D.-Ur III Sumerian, Akkadian, Old Babylonian, Old Assyrian, Middle Babylonian/Assyrian, Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Seleucid-Parthian. Accessibility to this increasingly fragmented world is still hampered by a scarcity of textbooks and general surveys that are taken for granted in the archaeology of other cultures.

As is clear from the historical outline above, the major landmarks in Mesopotamian archaeology are either discoveries or technical advances in methods of retrieval and documentation. There is little here that might count as intellectual history in the sense of a theoretical interpretive (and predictive) framework for understanding the archaeological record in social, historical, or anthropological terms. Progress has thus tended to be measured in empirical terms—the recovery of more and better evidence—rather than theoretical ones. Surveys of archaeological theory tend to make little reference to Mesopotamia, reflecting the difficulty in