In "The Mesopotamian Riddle's" epilogue, Hammer, a longtime journalist, recalls a visit to the British Museum when he was contemplating writing the book and looking for guidance. A scowling curator suggested he come back when he'd earned his PhD in Assyriology, and threatened to pan the eventual work in the London Review of Books. I'm no expert (if I was Henry Rawlinson pondering cuneiform, I'd have gone to my grave without figuring out which direction the lines go in), but I've read plenty of ancient-history popularizations, and this is one of the best. I'll defer to the eventual LRB review (the book's due out in March) on whether it gets the details of the decipherment right, but Hammer inspires confidence.

Edward Dolnick, a nonacademic who wrote "The Writing of the Gods," about the race to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics, has given the publisher a long, enthusiastic blurb for the book. If anything, Hammer has done an even better job than Dolnick did, avoiding Dolnick's occasionally gee-whizzy style and making the problems involved in translating cuneiform -- next to which reading hieroglyphics almost seems like a warmup exercise -- probably as clear as they can be to a general audience.

Simon & Schuster calls the book "rollicking," a word that invariably means a work does not, in fact, rollick at all. In this case, it hardly needs to. Hammer clearly did a vast amount of research and has come up with fascinating portraits of the main players, particularly soldier/diplomat/scholar Rawlinson and his protégé Henry Layard, who excavated Nineveh. Watching their relationship go from mutual admiration and warm friendship to near estrangement, largely because of Rawlinson's inability to admit his substantial mistakes in reading Assyrian texts, is genuinely sad.

The book also vividly brings home the hazards of mid-19th-century Middle Eastern archaeology, from malaria and cholera to insurrections against the Ottoman authorities to moving immensely heavy friezes and statuary from what's now northern Iraq to Basra and eventually London. And while the British Museum certainly deserves its reputation as a repository of stolen goods, it's interesting to read about the panic and anger with which the people of Mosul and a local qadi greeted Layard's unearthing of what they took to be demonic figures in the mound at Nimrod. I don't know if I'm up for the amount of Victorian prose that would be involved in reading the first-person accounts of those involved, but I'll be looking for more books on the era.

(ARC via NetGalley.)

More than 5000 years ago, scribes from the Mesopotamian kingdoms of Assyria, Babylon, and Sumer began inscribing information on clay using tiny symbols known as cuneiform. In the mid-19th century, during the height of the Victorian era in Europe, three distinct individuals vied to be the first to translate ancient Assyrian into English. Contrary to the notion that scholars always collaborate harmoniously, Hammer's latest historical work reveals startling conflicts, political maneuvering, class tensions, and deceitful tactics among these three ersatz translators. The narrative is quite revealing, with an archaeologist, a British military officer turned diplomat, and an Irish Rector as passionate, fascinating, and rather obsessive scientists of their era.

Unfortunately, "The Mesopotamian Riddle" is so densely packed with information that it's easy to become overwhelmed by trivial details or seemingly tangential historical digressions. As a result, the central narrative often gets rather lost. While the book is engaging, a more concise edition might be easier to follow. I would recommend this book primarily for avid history buffs; it may prove overly complex for the casual reader.

The extended title puts a bit of a spin on the facts but the idea is true.
This one took a bit more time for me to understand how the scholars of the 19th century started with an untranslated visual language and figured out the direction of the letters and developed an understanding of the meaning of the communication form on various stele created in a number of BCE kingdoms. they found evidence that scribes used three basic cuneiform-based languages.
There are a few photos that will be much better represented in a print copy. I did enjoy diving into it and have already preordered an audio.
I went bats over his earlier book The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts in 2016. Even if I prefer the term Archivists. I also learned a lot about the history, superstitions, and illegalities of a kettle of falcons in his book The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird in 2020.
I requested and received a temporary advance uncorrected reader's proof compliments of publisher Simon and Schuster via NetGalley. Thank you! I geek history!
Pub Date Mar 18, 2025 #TheMesopotamianRiddle by Joshua Hammer @Joshuaiveshamme @simonschuster #Nonfiction #LinguisticHistory

Great Read! Joshua Hammer made this book an extra adventure by giving such great detail to the adventurers of the 1800’s in the chase for finding all the historical relics and deciphering ancient languages of earlier civilizations. I am sure current archaeological digs are just as dangerous and fascinating. This book should be required reading for the current young generation so the appreciation of history is not lost. The epilogue is the evidence for that. A highly recommended book!

I had high hopes for this, but I suppose the subtitle gave it away: a list of white, privileged, European men doing research on ancient civilizations. The book is just one line after another repeating and reifying the white, Western, male, historic gaze. The author occasionally calls out racism in period sources, but needs this serious editing for casual and problematic writing throughout. One example is claiming that archaeology was essentially founded by Charles VII of Naples in 1748, but there were systematic studies of the past & its artifacts as early as the 6th century BCE. There's lots of things like deserts being “empty “ because there were no white people, only indigenous folks; similarly, there's far too much of “no one knew what it was/meant” with “no one” meaning, again, white European men. Even Hormuzd Rassam, a major contributor to the decipherment, is mentioned as a "local" who needed the mentorship and patronage of white men to become useful to them. The treatment of women is also an issue: “…he wrote to his aunt, Benjamin Austen’s wife, in London.” No name, just her status as something existing only in relation to a man. In work like this book, I expect at least a mention of the various "Others" who assisted with these projects.

Informative and written with a strong narrative arc, a definite recommendation for anyone who wants to learn more about how a simple find can lead to momentous discovery, and the academic battles along the way.

The information at the top of this Goodreads page (as well as the promotional blurb (neither probably, I know, not written by the author) at the front of the free electronic review copy of this book that I received) describes the book’s plot, in part, as follows:

Enter a swashbuckling archeologist, a suave British military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher this script that would enable them to peek farther back into human history than even before.

This, I think, gives the wrong impression. This is not a deal-breaker for me, but it tended to create a little confusion as I read.

I felt, rightly or wrongly, the setup indicated that there was going to be some sort of suspenseful early-Victorian-era competition between multiple parties of colorful 19th-century eccentrics to decode an ancient language. There was a competition (in 1857), it’s true, but it wasn’t really very suspenseful and in any case most of the book isn’t really about the competition, which is mentioned at the beginning of this book and then returned to in the last chapter. The competition was held to determine if the various competing parties, working independently, would come up with more or less the same translation of “eight hundred lines of tiny cuneiform characters” believed to date from 1100 BCE. If so, the writing of the language which eventually was known as “Akkadian” would be considered to be completely deciphered. If the participants came up with wildly different translations, one or more parties in the contest might experience public humiliation. (Spoiler: (view spoiler))

The book is largely about the long (about 30 years) period of excavation, state-sponsored looting, colonial hijinks, and squabbling academic rivalry that led up to the 1857 competition.

Sometimes the “Acknowledgements” section at the end of a book is not worth spending a lot of time on. They are often just a list of names of people who helped. In this case, it was more interesting, as the author tells of the rather snobbish rebuff that he received from a curator at the British Museum whom he asked for guidance. This was interesting as, in the course of the main narrative in the book, there were many examples of the same type of class arrogance which, for example, sometimes advantaged the swashbuckling (aristo) archaeologist mentioned above vs. the (provincial, relatively unconnected) Irish rector. However, given that, today, the British Museum is in greater need of favorable publicity, you might think that the staff would be more conscious of helping the uninformed. (In this case, the author has written several relatively successful books; he’s not like some random person off the street is asking questions that could be answered on Wikipedia.) In addition to the ever-rising clamor of former colonies asking for their looted patrimony returned, as well as a genuinely shocking case of a staff member who apparently, for years, stole British Museum property undetected and sold it to private collectors, you’d think that the British Museum would be more interested in cultivating a positive impression.

There were two words in this book that I didn't know and were not, I felt, completely understandable from context. They occurred close to each other near Kindle location 3652. They were: lamassu and kelek.

I received a free electronic copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley.

"The Mesopotamian Riddle" by Joshua Hammer is an intriguing blend of historical exploration and suspenseful narrative. Hammer skillfully delves into the ancient mysteries of Mesopotamia, uncovering secrets buried in time and blending them with a gripping modern-day investigation. The book’s meticulous research and vivid storytelling provide a fascinating glimpse into ancient civilizations while maintaining a thrilling pace. It’s a must-read for history enthusiasts and mystery lovers alike.

This was an interesting book. It was a little outside my knowledge reach, but I still enjoyed it and got something from it.