Ancient Iraq

Ancient Iraq

Georges Roux

Penguin Books

Of the great civilizations which flourished for over three thousand years between the Tigris and the Euphrates, little seemed to remain.
Ages of decline tended to obliterate almost every trace of the art, science, and literature of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. During the last century, however,there has been an unceasing effort on the pa rt of a rcha eoIog ists to u n cover th e monuments and texts which reveal the history and civilization of the region once called Mesopotamia.
Ancient Iraq is the first full political, cultural, and economic history to attempt to cover the whole of Mesopotamia from the days of prehistory to the Christian era. Dr Roux describes the empires, dynasties and religions of each millennium and suggests something of the splendour of Babylon before its capture by Cyrus. That so vast a subject makes such absorbing reading is due not only to the inevitable fascination of the past,butto the light,yet exact,touch of a talented historian.

Dr Georges Roux was bom at Salon-de-Provence in 1914. The son of an officer in the French Army, at the age of nine he accompanied his parents to the Middle East where he lived for twelve years in Syria and Lebanon before returning to France in 1935. He graduated in medicine at the University of Paris and practised in that city for several years; but he had by then become so interested in Ancient Near Eastern History that in his spare time he read assyriology at the Ecole du Louvre and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, subsequently pursuing his oriental studies side by side with his medical career. In 1950 he joined the Iraq Petroleum Company as a medical officer and served for two years in Qatar and seven years in Iraq. His original research work in southern Mesopotamia and the articles he wrote for specialized periodicals such as Sumer and the Revue d’Assyriologie have won him admission to the restricted circle of professional archaeologists and assyriologists.
Dr Roux now lives in Paris.