Sarah Kanning

Today I want to applaud the careful work of Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat, author of Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia (which I’ll call DLIAM after this for the sake of brevity), part of Daily Life series from Greenwood Press.

I mentioned the series awhile back, and said I found the quality of the books in the series uneven, but Nemet-Nejat does a great job of balancing careful and thorough research, clear reporting of facts and current theories, and engaging storytelling.

This book has been essential to my current project, which is a high fantasy novel that takes place in part in a society that shares some similarities with Sumer and other ancient city-states. For the kinds of information a writer needs for world-building, DLIAM is a wonderful resource, offering all the bits and pieces that are sometimes missing in more specialized scholarly works (what did people wear? what did they eat? how did they cook? what foods were considered peasant fare? what did people do for entertainment?), as well as details about political and religious life.

If you have access to JSTOR, you might check out Mark W. Chavalas’ review, here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/545946. He goes into a bit more detail on the scholarly side of things, and confirms my notion that Nemet-Nejat is an excellent scholar as well as a good writer.

Also, it’s now out in paperback! The version I read is the earlier hard cover. Find a copy at a nearby library or purchase it.

P.S. – I photographed the image illustrating this review at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City awhile back. It’s an Assyrian, I believe, picking dates about four thousand years ago. But doesn’t that look like a Timex on his wrist? Hmmm.