Search
Log in
  • Home

  • Categories

  • Audiobooks

  • E-books

  • For kids

  • Top lists

  • Help

  • Download app

  • Use campaign code

  • Redeem gift card

  • Try free now
  • Log in
  • Language

    🇳🇴 Norge

    • NO
    • EN

    🇧🇪 Belgique

    • FR
    • EN

    🇩🇰 Danmark

    • DK
    • EN

    🇩🇪 Deutschland

    • DE
    • EN

    🇪🇸 España

    • ES
    • EN

    🇫🇷 France

    • FR
    • EN

    🇳🇱 Nederland

    • NL
    • EN

    🇦🇹 Österreich

    • AT
    • EN

    🇨🇭 Schweiz

    • DE
    • EN

    🇫🇮 Suomi

    • FI
    • EN

    🇸🇪 Sverige

    • SE
    • EN
  1. Books
  2. Biographies
  3. Adventure and history

Read and listen for free for 14 days!

Cancel anytime

Try free now
4.3(3)

The Mesopotamian Riddle : An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing

A rollicking adventure starring three free-spirited Victorians on a 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—as humans were gathering in complex urban settlements—a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For three millennia, wedge shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon and of Persia’s mighty Achaemenid Empire, along with precious minutiae about everyday life in the cradle of civilization. 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 had captured the Victorian public’s imagination. Yet Europe’s best philologists struggled to decipher the bizarre inscriptions excavators were digging up.

Enter a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave British military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher this script that would enable them to peek farther back into human history than ever before.

From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, The Mesopotamian Riddle whisks you on a wild adventure through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand our past.


Author:

  • Joshua Hammer

Narrator:

  • Matthew Lloyd Davies

Format:

  • Audiobook

Duration:

  • 10 h 43 min

Language:

English

Categories:

  • Biographies
  • Adventure and history
  • History
  • Prehistory
  • History
  • Middle east
  • Nonfiction
  • Language

More by Joshua Hammer

Skip the list
  1. The Mesopotamian Riddle : An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing

    Joshua Hammer

    book
  2. The Falcon Thief : A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird

    Joshua Hammer

    audiobookbook
  3. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts

    Joshua Hammer

    book
  4. A Season in Bethlehem : Unholy War in a Sacred Place

    Joshua Hammer

    book

Others have also read

Skip the list
  1. Acting in Film : An Actor's Take on Movie Making

    Michael Caine

    audiobook
  2. 12 Masterpieces You Have to Read Before You Die. Philosophy

    Niccolo Machiavelli, Tommaso Campanella, Francis Bacon, Thomas More, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, Kahlil Gibran, Leo Tolstoy, G.K. Chesterton, Henry David Thoreau

    audiobook
  3. Fool

    Peter K. Andersson

    audiobook
  4. The Girl: A Life Lived in the Shadow of Roman Polanski

    Samantha Geimer

    audiobookbook
  5. Combee : Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War

    Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black

    audiobook
  6. The Path to Paradise : A Francis Ford Coppola Story

    Sam Wasson

    audiobook
  7. The Silencing of the Lambs

    Michael L Brown

    audiobook
  8. Rebel : My Life Outside the Lines

    Nick Nolte

    audiobook
  9. Watch Me : A Memoir

    Anjelica Huston

    audiobookbook
  10. Rightful Heritage : Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America

    Douglas Brinkley

    audiobook
  11. Searching for John Hughes : Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Watching '80s Movies

    Jason Diamond

    audiobook
  12. Star

    Peter Biskind

    audiobookbook

  • 5 books

    Joshua Hammer

    Joshua Hammer is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu 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.

    Read more

Help and contact


About us

  • Our story
  • Career
  • Press
  • Accessibility
  • Partner with us
  • Investor relations
  • Instagram
  • Facebook

Explore

  • Categories
  • Audiobooks
  • E-books
  • Magazines
  • For kids
  • Top lists

Popular categories

  • Crime
  • Biographies and reportage
  • Fiction
  • Feel-good and romance
  • Personal development
  • Children's books
  • True stories
  • Sleep and relaxation

Nextory

Copyright © 2025 Nextory AB

Privacy Policy · Terms ·
Excellent4.3 out of 5