It is no exaggeration to refer to the region’s culture, hardly imaginable without its cities (260), as “the most urbanized society of antiquity” (1). After all, the city as both a structure for human social and economic life and as a political form arose in Sumer (southernmost Mesopotamia) around 3400 BCE, and had therefore already existed for around 2500 years in the East before the flowering of the polis. Van De Mieroop’s focus here, urbanism, is an ideal topic through which to interest Classicists in the work of researchers into the ancient Near East. Like his forebear, Van De Mieroop has read widely in non-Mesopotamian history and social sciences including anthropology, sociology, and economics and is not shy in applying the fruits of this learning to Mesopotamian questions. The author of the volume under review explicitly identifies himself with the scholarly legacy of Oppenheim (3, 7-9) and with his efforts to address an audience beyond those initiated into the reading of cuneiform texts (xii). Portrait of a Dead Civilization (1964) and Letters from Mesopotamia (1967) received an enthusiastic reception from the educated public yet were controversial among some of his Assyriological colleagues. Leo Oppenheim (1904-1974), whose late books Ancient Mesopotamia. Perhaps most noteworthy in this regard was A. The opacity of much of our writing to lay readers and even to experts in other areas of ancient studies has long been a concern to a minority of cuneiformists, a number of whom have endeavored to produce more accessible works for a wider audience. To some extent this is a situation of our own making, since the prevailing scholarly discourse in cuneiform studies discourages generalization, model building, and indeed any efforts which go beyond the careful presentation of textual evidence and its philological explication. Students of the Ancient Near East have often been frustrated that the results of their researches have found so little resonance with Classicists and ancient historians.