Sucking the life out of dead civilizations
My book to read on the bus the past two weeks has been Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia by Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat. This is about twice as long as it would ordinarily take me to read xvi + 307 pages, since I have a decent-length commute. I'm just tired, I kept telling myself. I'm distracted by the story about the light rail being late because there's a car stalled on the tracks. I'm still thinking about that work thing. I feel like I'm coming down with a cold. Anything but the writing style in this book is just plain clunky, because I have waded through plenty of not-so-stellar academic books and survived, so there could be no possible reason to find this one so difficult. How much worse could it be than a discussion of which bird is the birdiest in one's mental classification system and lumpers vs. splitters and everything else that relates to cataloging theory? Why, an Assyriologist calls this book "eminently readable" right on the back cover!
Well. It is not in ancient Sumerian but in modern English, which means I can read it. But once I started getting over my maybe-cold, I decided it wasn't just the fuzziness in my head that made many sentences seem to have little or no connection to the previous ones. All the handy little transitional phrases that clarify the connection between this idea and that one are, all to often, missing.
The final chapter really encapsulates the book's problems. This chapter is titled "The Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia," which leads you to expect some sort of conclusion, something that sums up the book you just read. That's what legacies are all about, right? But what you get is something which summarizes it, like the author was assigned to paraphrase the preceding chapters in 300 words or less apiece, maybe to accommodate lazy students. Where are the observations that the Sumerian cuneiform didn't just lead to other writing systems (we do get that recap--thanks, but I already read chapter 4!), but that writing profoundly changed the societies which adopted it, and eventually made possible whole new and highly complex forms of social organization? Where are the cute observations about how this very book is written using a distant descendent of that original cuneiform, or that the daily horoscopes littering today's internet can be traced back to the Babylonian development of the zodiac? If this is just a summary, why isn't the chapter titled "Everything You Just Read, But Shorter"?
What really takes the cake is the final sentence of the book. This is it, the closing line! What insight might it offer?
We know even less about early metal, since it was melted down and reused.
...
That's it? There isn't another page with the real final paragraph hiding somewhere? Nope, that's really it. We know even less about early metal, since it was melted down and reused, the end.
Maybe I am just misunderstanding the point of the chapter, and it really is intended as a Cliffs Notes summary. But when basically the entire book reads like a longer version of this, well... (And in that case, the chapter title is misleading. "Summary" is not a synonym for "legacy"!)
I don't want to knock the book too much. It really is a very handy short volume absolutely packed with information about the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, and probably makes for a great quick reference text. And goodness knows I am sure there are much, much worse non-fiction prose stylists out there...
I just wish it were more, well, eminently readable.
Well. It is not in ancient Sumerian but in modern English, which means I can read it. But once I started getting over my maybe-cold, I decided it wasn't just the fuzziness in my head that made many sentences seem to have little or no connection to the previous ones. All the handy little transitional phrases that clarify the connection between this idea and that one are, all to often, missing.
The final chapter really encapsulates the book's problems. This chapter is titled "The Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia," which leads you to expect some sort of conclusion, something that sums up the book you just read. That's what legacies are all about, right? But what you get is something which summarizes it, like the author was assigned to paraphrase the preceding chapters in 300 words or less apiece, maybe to accommodate lazy students. Where are the observations that the Sumerian cuneiform didn't just lead to other writing systems (we do get that recap--thanks, but I already read chapter 4!), but that writing profoundly changed the societies which adopted it, and eventually made possible whole new and highly complex forms of social organization? Where are the cute observations about how this very book is written using a distant descendent of that original cuneiform, or that the daily horoscopes littering today's internet can be traced back to the Babylonian development of the zodiac? If this is just a summary, why isn't the chapter titled "Everything You Just Read, But Shorter"?
What really takes the cake is the final sentence of the book. This is it, the closing line! What insight might it offer?
We know even less about early metal, since it was melted down and reused.
...
That's it? There isn't another page with the real final paragraph hiding somewhere? Nope, that's really it. We know even less about early metal, since it was melted down and reused, the end.
Maybe I am just misunderstanding the point of the chapter, and it really is intended as a Cliffs Notes summary. But when basically the entire book reads like a longer version of this, well... (And in that case, the chapter title is misleading. "Summary" is not a synonym for "legacy"!)
I don't want to knock the book too much. It really is a very handy short volume absolutely packed with information about the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, and probably makes for a great quick reference text. And goodness knows I am sure there are much, much worse non-fiction prose stylists out there...
I just wish it were more, well, eminently readable.