An "adventure tale for puzzle lovers and Indiana Jones fans alike" (The Washington Post) following three free-spirited Victorians on their twenty-year quest to decipher cuneiform, the oldest writing in the world-from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.
It was one of history's great vanishing acts. Around 3,400 BCE, a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For the next three thousand years, wedge-shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great kingdoms of Mesopotamia. And then…the meaning of the characters was lost.
London, 1857. In an era obsessed with human progress, mysterious palaces emerging from the desert sands have captured the Victorian public's imagination. Assyria, Babylon, the mighty Persian Empire… these civilizations had gone down in the annals as the great antagonists to ancient Greece and ancient Israel. What did these "bad guys" of Western history have to say for themselves? What were their values, their rituals, their understandings of their place in the universe? What was it like simply to be human at the dawn of recorded history?
Enter a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher the script that would enable humans to peer farther back into our history than ever before. From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, let The Mesopotamian Riddle whisk you off on "an epic intellectual adventure" (The Wall Street Journal) through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand where we came from-and where we perhaps might go. Joshua Hammer is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, The Falcon Thief, and The Mesopotamian Riddle. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Outside. He lives in Berlin. "Listening to this history of the 1850s competition to decipher ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions is like listening to a Jules Verne or Conan Doyle adventure yarn. Narrator Matthew Lloyd Davies is a familiar voice in mystery and suspense fiction, and he clearly relishes what is not a musty story of scholarly reflection, but a cliff-hanger full of surprises and unexpected twists. Davies is a wonderful narrator for this kind of work, droll and cosmopolitan and silken to the ear. The process of decipherment will especially appeal to fans of espionage and decoding. But against the backdrop of Europe's historical relations with the Middle East, this is a story with many layers-and many buried treasures."
-AudioFile Magazine "[An] epic intellectual adventure... Mr. Hammer's ability to skip from philology to Great Game intrigue, from biblical sources to the 'Assyria fever' that swept London, is extraordinary."
-The Wall Street Journal "Written with brilliant characterization and edge-of-your-armchair suspense. As in the best detective novels, the story of those who uncover the mystery is as intriguing as the mystery itself."
-Julian Sancton, New York Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth "This tale of dusty scholars could have been as dry as the desert. But... Mr. Hammer makes dead languages speak again."
-The Economist "Joshua Hammer is a marvelous storyteller, and he has grabbed hold of one of history's great yarns. His rollicking tale, combining intellectual heft and fast-paced vigor, places readers ringside as rivals struggle with a deciphering mystery that had stymied the world for two thousand years."
-Edward Dolnick, New York Times bestselling author of The Writing of the Gods "Stirring.... [An] elegantly written, fascinating account."
-Pitt
