divining any distinctive evolving body of analytical and interpretive principles. This contrasts particularly with the history of European prehistory, in which such theory-building has played a leading role.

The primary reason for the dearth of theory has been the abundance of direct nonarchaeological evidence for the nature of Mesopotamian society, religion, history, literature, science, and much else in the tens of thousands of cuneiform documents recovered from Mesopotamian sites. Much of what a theoretical framework might hope to deliver in more general terms is here delineated in precise and vivid detail. There remains of course the challenge of synthesizing this highly particularistic evidence into general patterns of social, historical, and cultural behavior, for which methodological principles must be brought into play. But the resulting construction remains nonetheless far richer and more verifiable than would be possible from the archaeological material alone. In these circumstances the general neglect of theory is understandable, if not always beneficial.

In the first half of the twentieth century, two individuals stand out for their more profound theoretical contributions to Mesopotamian archaeology: vere gordon childe and henri frankfort. Childe looked to the East for the source of key technological innovations—in particular bronze-working and agriculture—that, through their diffusion to Europe, determined the course and nature of Bronze Age culture in that area (Childe’s primary area of expertise). Childe approached such developments within a Marxist framework, one predicated upon assumptions of historical determinism and cultural materialism. Indeed it is the application of these supposed universal principles of social and economic evolution to the understanding of archaeological remains that has underpinned Childe’s continuing interest in archaeological theory; otherwise works such as The Most Ancient East (1928), which ends with a chapter on “Proofs of Diffusion,” and Man Makes Himself (1936), with its Durkheimian characterisation of a depersonalised Oriental despotism, would long ago have been consigned to the realm of historical curiosities.

Childe’s work on the Near East, which largely synthesised existing data, was more influential among Europeanists than Near Easterners, and this remains true today. Henri Frankfort, on the other hand, had a significant impact on his own and subsequent generations of Near-Eastern scholars both as an excavator and as a synthesiser of archaeological and textual evidence. Beyond his work on the iconography of cylinder seals and sculpture, and the periodization of the Early Dynastic period, all of which remain fundamental today, Frankfort wrote in a more speculative vein on what he called the mythopoeic (myth-making) culture of Mesopotamia. As the name implies, this approach took its point of departure from the cuneiform literary tradition, in particular the myths, which Frankfort saw as “a carefully chosen cloak for abstract thought” (1948), supplemented by anthropological insights into the conceptual frameworks of other nonwestern societies.

The mythopoeic approach was applied most fruitfully in Frankfort’s analysis of the origins of civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3000 b.c., where it provided a basis for understanding the many cultural dissimilarities that cut across these two cultures’ parallel technological trajectories. On the other hand, Frankfort’s work on the “intellectual adventure” of the ancient Near East had little direct impact on his more typological and art historical discussions of the archaeological record, which tended to be influenced instead by his readings in German art theory, especially as transplanted to the Warburg Institute in London, of which Frankfort became director in 1949. Here archaeology provided illustration of ideas inspired by textual sources rather than vice versa. His last book on The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient (1954) is largely traditional in approach, with no conspicuous dependence on a supposed Mesopotamian Weltanschauung. Indeed, while Frankfort saw himself primarily as an archaeologist, his most significant legacy may turn out to be in the empathetic conceptualization of ancient cultural experience (an aspect of his thought much influenced by R.G. Collingwood’s 1946 book The Idea of History)—a conceptualization that proceeded primarily from literary sources. It remains