Your final evaluative annotative bibliography is due. It should be a culmination of the eight weekly evaluative annotated bibliographies you have been compiling from events chosen from your annotate

Annotated Bibliography

Name

Institutional Affiliations

Annotated Bibliography

Ackerman, S. (2015). Ancient Mesopotamia: The Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Oxford University Press.

This is a great book that explains a lot about Mesopotamian culture. There are several high-quality color images of artifacts, as well as extensive, seemingly well-researched text throughout the book’s chapters. Each chapter focuses on the routines of a specific profession (e.g., Doctors, Merchants and Traders, Scientist, and Peasant Farmers). This resource's usefulness is increased by including a vocabulary, biographical dictionary, and timeline (spanning around 9000 BC to 539 BC).

Kuhrt, A. (2013). The Persian Empire: a corpus of sources from the Achaemenid period. Routledge.

This book is a comprehensive source material for retracing the Achaemenid Persian Empire's past can be found within this sumptuous bundle of books. Historically, it has been challenging to study Achaemenid history due to the wide variety of languages and time periods represented in the original sources, as well as the risk of relying too much on prejudiced and erroneous Greek and Roman sources. Here, Amelie Kuhrt brings together, for the first time, translated works from Greek, Old Persian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Egyptian, and Latin sources that together offer a comprehensive picture of the Empire. This compilation is vast and will serve as an invaluable resource for students of Persian history at all levels.

Lambert, W. G. (2016). Ancient Mesopotamian religion and mythology: selected essays (Vol. 15). Mohr Siebeck.

By 700 B.C., this book claims, the Aramaeans had migrated down the Euphrates and made up the vast majority of the region's population in southern Mesopotamia. By this time, Assyria's military might had already begun to dwindle. For a brief period (between 600 and 550 B.C.E.), the former glories of Babylon were restored by rulers like Nebuchadnezzar, even though the kingdom was just as much Aramaean as it had been Amorite previously. The revived Babylon was destroyed by the Persians, and the Aramaean world eventually fell under the rule of the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans.

Liverani, M. (2013). The ancient Near East: History, society and economy. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315879895

Three thousand years of history (from about 3500-500 bc) in the Ancient Near East are revealed in this one book. Liverani uses his own personal voyage, which he has been on for over 25 years, to reconstruct the past of the ancient Near Eastern peoples. Expertly describing the lives of the Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Sumerians, and many more, one of the world's foremost experts in Assyriology provides an exhaustive account of their civilizations' pasts.

May, L. (2019). Ancient legal thought. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108670012

According to the author of this article almost four thousand years ago, kings across the ancient world, but notably in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), were confronted with a crisis of unprecedented dimensions. Many people were so deeply in debt that they were forced to sell themselves or their children into slavery to cover their outstanding obligations. Lenders were able to charge interest rates of 20% to 30% because the law appeared to protect them and the borrowers had no legal redress. It was only fair that the debtors be paid in full. However, the author explores the emergent concept of equality in law seemed to demand an alternative outcome: the employment of law as a means to liberate people from economic tyranny. Since overwhelming debt is a significant issue underlying social inequality, debt relief edicts, often known as "clean-slate laws," were enacted and bear evident relevance today.

Monroe, M. W. (2022). Astronomical and astrological diagrams from cuneiform sources. Journal for the History of Astronomy, 53(3), 338-361.

This article aims to provide a broad overview of cuneiform tablet diagrams found in Ancient Mesopotamia's extensive library of astronomical and astrological texts. The cuneiform material and Egyptian representations are some of the first visual evidence of astral beliefs and paradigms depicted in textual media. This article also summarizes crucial observations concerning the connection between diagrams and texts and tablets, as well as the depiction of theoretical knowledge from the cuneiform sources from which these diagrams have survived.

Peters, M. A. (2021). The ancient Silk Road and the birth of merchant capitalism. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(10), 955-961.

According to the article, a vast system of trading posts, markets, and thoroughfares were deliberately placed along the Silk Road routes to facilitate the movement, storage, and sale of commodities. Roads connected the ancient Greco-Roman metropolis of Antioch with the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon and the Mesopotamian city of Seleucia on the Tigris River in modern-day Iraq. Products traveled up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers from the Persian Gulf ports that were accessible via the Silk Road. Ports along the Mediterranean Sea provided access to the rest of the Roman Empire and Europe via sea trade routes that originated in these cities.