New Books In Middle Eastern Studies

I have a (much beloved) colleague who calls all history about things before AD 1900 “that old stuff.” Of course she means it as a gentle jab at those of us who study said “old stuff.” Gentle, but in some ways telling. Many historians and history readers genuinely have a bias against the older periods, and particularly against the history of the pre-Hellenic Ancient World (roughly 10,000 BCE to 500 BCE). That’s really too bad for a whole host of reasons. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just list three “biggies”: 1) The Ancient World witnessed the greatest single break in the history of humankind, that is, the transition from hunter-gather to sedentary agricultural life; 2) The deepest roots of our civilizations (Western, Eastern, you name it) are mostly to be found in the Ancient World; 3) Finally, the basic institutions of what we think of as “modern” life were all hammered out for the first time in the Ancient World. Take, for example, diplomacy. As Amanda Podany shows in her engaging new book Brotherhood