History Book Reviews - Three City Books: Ur, Ugarit, and Erbil

This post collects three of the book reviews rescued from my G+ feed. Each of these books discusses the archaeology and known history of a single ancient city: Ur, in the land of Sumer, Ugarit, in the land of Canaan, and Erbil, in the land of Assyria.

1. Ur - The City of the Moon God
by Harriet Crawford, 2015, 146 pages

This book offers a capsule history of the ancient city of Ur, one of the oldest known cities in the world. Located on the lower Euphrates river near the head of the Persian Gulf, this city played an important role in the early history of the ancient near east and, for about 100 years at the end of the 3rd millennium BC, was arguably the most important city in the world.

The author, Harriet Crawford, is one of the most prolific writers on this period and definitely knows her stuff. As a survey, this book covers all the periods that saw people living and working on the site, from the Ubaid period c.5000 BC to its eventual decline sometime during the or after time the Persians ruled Babylon c.500BC. She also discusses the archaeological work of Sir Leonard Woolley in excavating the city in the '20s.

As a light survey, I think it does a fine job. It's accessible to the lay-person and relatively concise. For my money, though, I think I would have preferred something more complete - an encyclopedia of the city of Ur. As such this book is nowhere near complete. It lacks illustrations of many of the key finds discussed in the text, and is missing king lists and other historical data. It's also a little shy on synthesis, which is something I have found in other books by this author - she prefers to lay out facts and let the reader draw their own conclusions. This book mainly focuses on the architecture based on archaeological evidence. It adds little that is new to the discussion of Ur, so if you've already read something about this city or period in some depth, you won't find anything too exciting in here.

If you're interested in cities of the ancient near east (including Ur), then I would point you instead to Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City by Gwendolyn Leick, which tells the story of ancient Mesopotamia, from the first cities to the invasion of the Persians, one city at a time from Eridu to Babylon. It's one of the most remarkable books on ancient history I've ever read, and Ur gets its own chapter. 

2. Ugarit: Ras Shamra 

by Adrian Curtis, 1985, 125pp

Ancient cities fascinate me because they're puzzles. They can be excavated for years, but never fully discovered, so scholars and archaeologists take what they can find and try to create the most complete picture possible. Even the most complete picture still leaves a lot to the imagination, and there are always new places to dig, either sideways or down.

Ugarit is one of those cities. Chances are you haven't heard of it, but it's an interesting place. It lies on a headland on the Mediterranean shore of modern Syria, south of the Turkish border. It was settled and abandoned more than once between 6000 and 2000 BC, and finally reached its peak development in the middle and late bronze age between about 1800 and 1200 BC. It was destroyed and abandoned for good during the cataclysmic Bronze Age Collapse that took place around 1200-1100 BC - the same event that saw the fall of a great many cities in the area, including the Hittite empire of ancient Turkey and the Mycenaean civilization in what is now Greece.

During its heyday, Ugarit was an important nexus for trade, being at the northern edge of Egyptian influence, the eastern edge of Mycenaean influence, the southern edge of Hittite influence, and the western edge of Mittanian and Assyrian (and before them Akkadian) influence. Being always on the edge of great empires, it was both free to develop its own culture and yet close enough to be exposed to what was happening in larger and more influential centres. It was occupied by a mix of Semitic and Hurrian speaking people.

The most important discoveries from Ugarit are the written tablets containing what has become known as the Ugaritic Script - perhaps the earliest alphabetic script - which was used to write the Ugaritic language - a semitic language related to Hebrew. These ancient writing tablets contain records of financial transactions, correspondence, and most important, the most complete records of Canaanite myth so far discovered.

Ugarit by Adrian Curtis describes the early history of the city, life in its golden age (including a brief summary of some of the sordid affairs of its kings), a description of the city based on archaeology, a summary of the myths discovered, and two more in-depth essays on what the religion of the city might have looked like and why all of this is relevant to bible scholars.

I particularly enjoyed reading about King Ammistamru's troubles involving his brothers and what appear to be two divorces, all of which seemed to need the interference of the Hittite king to be settled. I also enjoyed reading the myths of the city god, Baal, and the discussion of how he relates to the Hebrew god, Yahweh.

This volume by Curtis is one of a few book length treatments of the city I'm aware of. Another, by Marguerite Yon, translated into English from the original french, is a little newer and probably probably more up-to-date, since a major find of 300 tablets was discovered in the years between when these two books were published. I haven't read that book, but would be inclined to suggest it instead of this one simply because it is more current. But if you happen to see the Curtis book on a used book shop shelf somewhere, by all means pick it up and give it a read.

And if you already know something about Ugarit and would like to learn more, then be sure to check out the historical novel by my friend, Richard Abbott: The Flame Before Us which is set in Ugarit during its final fall c.1200 BC. 

3. A City from the Dawn of History: 

Erbil in the Cuneiform Sources 

by John MacGinnis, 2014, 128 pages

My ideal book on an ancient city would include both original written texts and archaeological data, both of which are thin on the ground. Rather good books have been written about the cities of Ebla and Mari. I recently reviewed one on Ur and another on Ugarit. This book focuses on Erbil (anciently known as Irbilum, Urbilum, Urbel, and Arbail) which is located in Iraqi Kurdistan on the Lesser Zab river. It's not my ideal book, but it has enough to keep me interested.

Unlike Ebla, Mari, Ugarit, and Ur, the city of Erbil is still an inhabited city of about 1.5 million people. There is evidence for settlement here as far back as the Ubaid period (C.5000 BC), so Erbil is a contender for the title of the world's oldest continuously inhabited city. Being inhabited, Erbil hasn't been able to benefit from an extensive archaeological program, but with the help of UNESCO it is about to implement one as part of a revitalization program. This book, therefore, focuses on what was anciently written about Erbil in the cuneiform texts from the late 3rd millennium to the time of Alexander the Great - hence the subtitle.

Check out this Wikipedia article to see a picture of the ancient heart of Erbil, located under the citadel on what is obviously an ancient tell. A "tell" is a city mound, built up over centuries of continuous habitation in one spot. 

A City From the Dawn of History does a good job of describing the history of Erbil (such as is possible) through the ancient period. The author makes some educated guesses based on scant resources for the early periods, and those texts are provided in translation. Later texts, from the late Assyrian period, are only summarized, rather than translated, and in this I was a little disappointed - it would have been nice to have more of these written out in full.

One of the more interesting treatments in this book is the analysis of how the name for the city was written during different time periods. The various names are shown in cuneiform, transliterated, and translated, so we can see how not only the name changed, but how cuneiform writing itself changed - and that's a fascinating thing!

Around 3100 BC, during the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur, the name was written Ur bi lum followed by the sign KI. This last sign is written, but not pronounced. It's what's called a determinative and it's used to classify the word - in this case as a land or large city. The same signs, Ur-bi-lum, could be used to describe something else, if a different determinative was used.

By c.1700 BC the name was spelled Ur bi el , a phonetic spelling, followed by the KI sign. The actually cuneiform symbols look very different from those of 500 years earlier - they are simpler.

By the late second millennium, the name is written Ar ba il and now preceded by the determinative URU (meaning city). KI is no longer used.

By the middle of the 1st millennium, the name is written using the sign for the number 4 and the sign for god, DINGIR, preceeded by the URU determinative. This is because scribes were now using the signs for 4 (pronounced 'arba') and for God (pronounced 'il') to write the name. Using just those two signs one could approximate the sound of the name Arbil. And so the city earned the nickname "City of the Four Gods" - not because it had four gods, but because of a scribal spelling convention.

The actual city god of Erbil was called Ishtar of Arbail and she was one of the most important goddesses of the Assyrian Empire. Erbil was, at that time, one of the key cities of the Assyrian heartland. Her temple was called Egashankalamma ("House of the Lady of the Land") and King Esarhaddon of Assyria claimed to have covered it in electrum.

A prominent prophet lived here at that time, and a number of those prophecies appear, translated, in another book I reviewed: Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East by Martti Nissinen.

So, to conclude, this book isn't my ideal - it's missing the archaeological information I'd normally look for because the city is still thickly settled. But it really does give you everything else that's available, with some wonderful synthesis and great illustrations. Of the three books presented here, it's the one that presented me with the most pleasant surprises.