FOREWORD

It is difficult to emphasize enough in a foreword of 750 words the importance of studying the history and civilization of the cultures that are presented in Ancient Egypt and the Near East: An Illustrated History. More than 50 centuries of human history, 6000—330 BCE, are surveyed, and when woven together the tapestry that emerges is not only rich in detail, but mammoth in size. Its pattern depicts kingdoms and royal dynasties that overlap, interlock, and disappear into each other. Amid complicated sequences of conflict and cooperation, what heralds the advent or apogee of one culture often signals the nadir of another.

Until recent times, the origin of humanity’s spiritual and intellectual achievement has been sought almost exclusively in the words of the Bible and amid the cultural remains of Greece and Italy. However, the discoveries made by archaeologists during the past 175 years have clearly demonstrated that the peoples of the ancient Near East have played crucial roles in forming our common human heritage. For it was in the ancient Near East more than 5,000 years ago that people learned to live in cities, invented effective systems of writing, and developed highly evolved civilizations. It is not hard to see that an understanding of what they did so long ago gives us both a map and a key to today’s political, social, and economic geography.

Faced with a massive array of influential names and places, one stumbles among them to find a vantage point and is reduced to stuttering with the staccato beat of a cultural Morse code: Luxor, Babylon, and Tyre! Ur, Nineveh, and

Jerusalem! Palmyra, Petra, and Persepolis! Akhenaton, Ramses, and Nefertiti! Sargon, Nebuchadnezzar, and Hammurabi! Cyrus, Ashurbanipal, and Sennacherib! Sustaining the endeavors of these people and their cities were famous rivers, the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris, and a stream of languages from Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Hittite to Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics flowed along their banks.

The West has long been fascinated by the East. The former’s music, art, literature, and architecture are peppered with learned and romanticized interpretations of the latter. The formal study of these cultures, languages, and peoples forms the substance of the modern academic discipline known as Near Eastern Studies. We have today major centers for scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. These include the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, founded in Cairo in 1835, the Oriental Institute and the Sackler Library at the University of Oxford, and the Oriental Institute founded in Chicago in 1919 by Egyptologist James Henry Breasted (1865—1935). Business and philanthropic organizations are also contributing to the field. In November 2009, Google announced that it would provide free access to images of the artifacts included in the collections of the Iraqi National Museum. In Syria, the World Monuments Fund and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture are working together to preserve and interpret the archaeological remains at Aleppo.

Nevertheless, advances in Near Eastern historiography have been hindered by the lack of any

FOREWORD

Comprehensive, indigenous accounts and by the dispersal of archaeological finds to myriad public and private collections around the world. Nonetheless, from the 19th century up to the present day we have learned much and continue to do so from an astonishing array of archaeological discoveries. Assyriologist George Smith (1840-1876) thrilled the world when he discovered the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Chaldean account of the Great Flood while working at the British Museum among the cuneiform tablets found by Austen Layard (1817-1894). So did Howard Carter (1874-1939), a former student of the Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) who held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom, when Carter peered by candlelight into the tomb of Tutankhamen in November 1922. During the same period, major discoveries were made at Ur and Nimrud by the Mesopotamian archaeologists Charles Leonard Woolley (1880-1960) and Max Mallowan (1904-1978).

However, every journey of learning starts with an initial step, and Ancient Egypt and the

Near East:An Illustrated History is a splendid place to begin. Students who fall captive to the intrinsic interest and sheer magnitude of the achievements here presented may find the start of a lifetime’s interest or even a professional career, for much work remains to be done. In this light, we may well change the last word of a famous passage from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” (1818) and declare:“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and celebrate!”