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A review by g_r_frank
The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land by Mogens Trolle Larsen
4.0
I picked this book up because of my interest in the early cultures of Sumeria, the Akadians, Assyrians and Babalon, and was interested in learning about the early discoveries and discoverers. The book has some great illustrations and photos, and tells of the early archeologists (more like treasure hunters) who found the lost civilizations, and began to decipher the strange cuneiform writings. It gets into the personalities of these men and their dangerous journeys as well as the personal, political, social, and religious forces that swayed their findings.
There were personal rivalries, political influences, social/religious pressures and both bigotry and acceptance of foreign cultures that this book gets deeply into. The beginning of the book seemed to be written with much more interesting insights and antidotes about these early archeologists which made the reading of their adventures a bit more engaging. toward the end it seemed the writing just started popping in more and more dry facts and quotes and comments that they had written down... making the reading a little less engaging. However, the book really does bring some sense of both the triumphs and the human frailty of the people involved in unearthing this lost history.
The book pulls no punches and shows these men's good and bad sides, their warts and their insights. I made the mistake of reading this as my night time reading... it is a bit dry for that I guess and it took me a long time to read through just reading at night. But in the end it was a very comprehensive history of these early discoverers and the world they lived in as they unearthed what had been long forgotten.
There were personal rivalries, political influences, social/religious pressures and both bigotry and acceptance of foreign cultures that this book gets deeply into. The beginning of the book seemed to be written with much more interesting insights and antidotes about these early archeologists which made the reading of their adventures a bit more engaging. toward the end it seemed the writing just started popping in more and more dry facts and quotes and comments that they had written down... making the reading a little less engaging. However, the book really does bring some sense of both the triumphs and the human frailty of the people involved in unearthing this lost history.
The book pulls no punches and shows these men's good and bad sides, their warts and their insights. I made the mistake of reading this as my night time reading... it is a bit dry for that I guess and it took me a long time to read through just reading at night. But in the end it was a very comprehensive history of these early discoverers and the world they lived in as they unearthed what had been long forgotten.