Bryce, Trevor. The Kingdom of the Hittites, new ed. 2005. The definitive study of the Hittites.
Fagan, Brian M. People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory, 13th ed. 2009. A thorough survey that presents up-to-date scholarship, designed for students.
Harding, A. F. European Societies in the Bronze Age. 2000. A comprehensive survey of developments in Europe during the Bronze Age.
Hawass, Zahi. Silent Images: Women in Pharaonic Egypt. 2000. Blends text and pictures to draw a history of ancient Egyptian women.
Leick, Gwendolyn. The Babylonians. 2002. An introduction to all aspects of Babylonian life and culture.
McCarter, Susan Foster. Neolithic. 2007. An introductory survey of the development and impact of agriculture, with many illustrations.
McDowell, A. G. Village Life in Ancient Egypt: Laundry Lists and Love Songs. 1999. A readable study of the basic social and economic factors of the entire period.
Podany, Amanda. Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East. 2010. Examines a thousand years of diplomacy among rulers.
Reeves, Nicholas. Akhenaten. 2001. Gives a detailed account of the pharaoh, Nefertiti, and their world.
Saggs, H. W. F. The Babylonians. 2002. An account of all the eras of Mesopotamian history.
Tattersall, Ian. Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins. 2012. An up-to-date survey of how humans evolved, in a lively narrative written for general readers.
Van de Mieroop, Marc. A History of the Ancient Near East, 3000–332 B.C.E. 2010. A concise history from Sumerian cities to Alexander the Great.
Visicato, Giuseppe. The Power and the Writing: The Early Scribes of Mesopotamia. 2000. Studies the practical importance of early Mesopotamian scribes.
DOCUMENTARIES
Ancient Worlds: Come Together (BBC, 2010). Archaeologist and historian Richard Miles explores the beginning of civilization in the cities of Mesopotamia.
Egypt’s Golden Empire (PBS, 2002). This three-part series on the era of the New Kingdom examines the lives of pharaohs, nobles, and ordinary people in Egypt’s expanding empire.
FEATURE FILMS
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010). Renowned director Werner Herzog goes inside the newly discovered Chauvet caves of southern France to film the oldest-known human artwork from around 32,000 years ago.
The Kings: From Babylon to Baghdad (History Channel, 2004). This feature-length History Channel special surveys the rulers of Mesopotamia from Sargon of Akkad to Saddam Hussein, with special attention to military matters.
WEB SITES
Ancient Civilizations, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Three interactive sites from the British Museum with objects in the museum’s fabulous collection, with maps, essays, and other resources. www.ancientcivilizations.co.uk/home_set.html www.mesopotamia.co.uk/ ancientegypt.co.uk/
The Ancient Egypt Film Site. Egyptian themes abound in horror flicks, mummy movies, cartoon shows, sitcoms, and every other kind of popular entertainment. This Web site covers them all, from the 1890s to today. www.ancientegyptfilmsite.nl/
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. CDLI offers scholars tens of thousands of pictures of cuneiform texts, many with transcriptions in English, plus a useful wiki written by scholars about Mesopotamian history. Run by UCLA and the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science.
cdli.ucla.edu
cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/
Eternal Egypt. A multimedia site with over fifteen hundred examples of Egyptian art and artifacts, along with articles, maps, and animations. Run by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Egyptian Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage, and IBM. www.eternalegypt.org/EternalEgyptWebsiteWeb/HomeServlet
Theban Mapping Project. An interactive site run by a scholar from the American University in Cairo that highlights the excavations of palaces, tombs, and temples in the Valley of the Kings, with maps, videos, articles, and thousands of photos. www.thebanmappingproject.com/