Interspersing fact-filled essays with fictional eyewitness accounts, Roy Burrell makes the ancient world a real place inhabited by real people going about their everyday business of work and family life. A fascinating essay about the history of the region of Mesopotamia is followed by "interviews" with an early settler who extols the virtues of the date palm, with a 12-year-old boy who is studying to be a scribe, and with a soldier. A section on the...