Beautiful edition featuring the origins of modern Western Civilisation in the crescent of the middle east, just before the Ancient Egyptian culture. A gorgeous Collector's Edition. Exploring the ancient origins of Sumer we find the beginnings of civilization as we know it now, with language, cities, religious conviction, organised society and a wealth of culture revealed in clay tablets collected in ancient libraries. Between the rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates rose a powerful force just before the Ancient Egyptians and Chinese, later to be succeeded by Babylon, a powerful city state in 1800 BCE, a centre of spiritual, economic and military power that emerged just before the mighty Indus and Mycenean civilizations. Flame Tree Collector's Editions present the foundations of speculative fiction, authors, myths and tales without which the imaginative literature of the twentieth century would not exist, bringing the best, most influential and most fascinating works of myth and history into a striking and collectable library. Each book features a new introduction and a Glossary of Terms. Matthias Adelhofer (introduction) is trained in Akkadian and Sumerian philology as well as Ancient Near Eastern archaeology. Currently, he is studying letters exchanged in the course of Old Assyrian long-distance trade. From the materiality, general epistolographic practices, and form to the modes of rhetoric used in the texts, he is investigating the social norms and mentalities present in the correspondence. He has also studied Neo-Babylonian economic archives and the social networks of the persons featuring in them. He is especially interested in social and economic history, linguistics, and palaeography.