MARC VAN DE MIEROOP is Professor of History at Columbia University and Director of Columbia's Center for the Ancient Mediterranean. Previously, he taught at Yale University and the University of Oxford. He is Founding Editor of the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History and the author of numerous books on the histories of the ancient Near East and Egypt, including A History of Ancient Egypt, King Hammurabi of Babylon, and The Eastern Mediterranean in the Age of Ramesses II.

List of Illustrations x

List of Charts xiii

List of Maps xiv

List of Debates xv

List of Boxes xvi

List of Documents xvii

Preface xix

Author's Note xxii

1 Introductory Concerns 1

1.1 What Is the Ancient Near East? 1

1.2 The Sources 4

1.3 Geography 5

1.4 Prehistoric Developments 9

Part I City-States 19

2 Origins: The Uruk Phenomenon 21

2.1 The Origins of Cities 22

2.2 The Development of Writing and Administration 29

2.3 The "Uruk Expansion" 37

2.4 Uruk's Aftermath 39

3 Competing City-States: The Early Dynastic Period 41

3.1 The Written Sources and Their Historical Uses 42

3.2 Political Developments in Southern Mesopotamia 45

3.3 Warfare and Political Centralization 48

3.4 The Wider Near East 52

3.5 Early Dynastic Society 55

3.6 Scribal Culture 58

4 Political Centralization in the Late Third Millennium 63

4.1 The Kings of Akkad 64

4.2 The Third Dynasty of Ur 74

5 The Near East in the Early Second Millennium 85

5.1 Nomads and Sedentary People 86

5.2 Babylonia 90

5.3 Assyria and the East 94

5.4 Mari and the West 100

6 The Growth of Territorial States in the Early Second Millennium 106

6.1 Shamshi-Adad and the Kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia 108

6.2 Hammurabi's Babylon 111

6.3 The Old Hittite Kingdom 120

6.4 The "Dark Age" 123

Part II Territorial States 127

7 The Club of the Great Powers 129

7.1 The Political System 131

7.2 Political Interactions: Diplomacy and Trade 134

7.3 Regional Competition: Warfare 141

7.4 Shared Ideologies and Social Organizations 143

8 The Western States of the Late Second Millennium 149

8.1 Mittani 150

8.2 The Hittite New Kingdom 155

8.3 Syria-Palestine 163

9 Kassites, Assyrians, and Elamites 171

9.1 Babylonia 172

9.2 Assyria 178

9.3 The Middle Elamite Kingdom 184

10 The Collapse of the Regional System and Its Aftermath 189

10.1 The Events 190

10.2 Interpretation 196

10.3 The Aftermath 198

Part III Empires 207

11 The Near East at the Start of the First Millennium 209

11.1 The Eastern States 210

11.2 The West 218

12 The Rise of Assyria 230

12.1 Patterns of Assyrian Imperialism 231

12.2 The Historical Record 238

12.3 Ninth-Century Expansion 240

12.4 Internal Assyrian Decline 244

13 Assyria's World Domination 248

13.1 The Creation of an Imperial Structure 249

13.2 The Defeat of the Great Rivals 252

13.3 The Administration and Ideology of the Empire 259

13.4 Assyrian Culture 260

13.5 Assyria's Fall 265

14 The Medes and Babylonians 270

14.1 The Medes and the Anatolian States 271

14.2 The Neo-Babylonian Dynasty 275

15 The Creation of a World Empire: Persia 288

15.1 The Sources and Their Challenges 289

15.2 The Rise of Persia and Its Expansion 290

15.3 Governance of the Subject States 295

15.4 The Creation of an Imperial Structure 298

16 Governing a World Empire: Persia 306

16.1 Political Developments 306

16.2 Administration of the Empire 310

16.3 Local Forms of Persian Administration 313

16.4 The End of the Empire 319

Epilogue 323

King Lists 324

Guide to Further Reading 339

Bibliography 345

Comprehensive Time Line 359

Index 363