Mesopotamia in particular is so strange. It feels like we don't understand them. Not nearly as well as many other ancient peoples are understood. Their relig

Mesopotamia in particular is so strange. It feels like we don't understand them. Not nearly as well as many other ancient peoples are understood. Their religion was obviously terribly complicated but so little of it makes sense to the modern person. All of the references in their literature are self-references, but since like 99% of everything is lost (even though Mesopotamia is probably the most well-documented ancient civilization) most it makes little sense, even to the experts, for lack of context. (The way that cuneiform tablets fragment heightens that effect.) The result is sort of paradoxical. We know more about certain aspects of Mesopotamian life 4000 years ago - particularly their economy and their own internal history - than we know about some much more recent societies. But many Assyriologists I imagine would sacrifice a great deal of barley records for a single chapter from Mesopotamia that's more like either Lucretius or Herodotus, for example, with some insight into how they understood things like metaphysics or politics.