Introduction: Mesopotamia matters -- An ancient museum and the history of history -- The clay drum : "the first written words started here" -- The brick of Amar-Suen : Mesopotamia's building blocks -- The statue of King Shulgi : how to be a good king -- The school tablets : ancient Babylonian ABCs -- The cone of Kudur-Mabuk : the birth of science -- The boundary stone : slaves and scribes, weavers and wives -- The mace head : the art vs reality of war -- Ennigaldi-Nanna : princess, priestess, and curator? -- Epilogue: Between us and them -- Acknowledgments -- Selected artifacts cited -- A timeline of ancient Mesopotamian history -- Bibliography -- Notes -- Index

"Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time. What they left behind, in a vast region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the earliest depiction of a wheel and the first approximation of pi.... the world's first cities, the first writing system, early seeds of agriculture, and groundbreaking developments in medicine and astronomy"--