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Most of Bauer's hooks are created through historic leaders. Her preface invites us into the human story of Antiquity—and it is a story, not a bloodless text that drones endlessly on, not a barrage of disconnected facts. Listen in on the book's first sentences:
Sometime around 1770 bc, Zimri-Lim, king of the walled city of Mari on the banks of the Euphrates, got exasperated with his youngest daughter.
A decade earlier, Zimri-Lim had married his oldest daughter Shimatum to the king of another walled and sovereign city called Ilansura. It was a good match, celebrated with enormous feasts and heaps of presents (mostly from the bride's family to the groom).
Within the first page the tone is set for a public discourse. The obscure Zimri-Lim has a socio-political context, along with a human dimension. Bauer unfolds the story with an account of his wives, the birth of twins, a disowned second wife, and the otherwise trite story of royal succession. This scenario doesn't dispense geographic, economic, and cultural information in indigestible form, but neither does Bauer ignore these important aspects of her subject; rather, she works them into this prefatory case study, in which she lays out her approach for the entire volume.
Not one reader in a million will ponder the clay tablets that record the history of Mari. But being a public intellectual necessitates bringing such sources to the front while leaving the research-laden discussion to specialists. Whether in her discussion of Greek "Trading Posts and Colonies" (Chapter 49) or the Assyrian decline (Chapter 50), Bauer reaches into primaries like Homer, Herodotus, Livy, Dio Cassius, Plutarch, Tacitus, Josephus, I and II Kings, Xenophon, Hesiod, and a host of others. She also consults important secondary works like H. W. F. Saggs' Babylonians. And her text is strengthened by drawing on key works from archaeologists, such as C. L. Woolley's classic reports on Ur—and views on Akhenaton from that candid Canadian at Penn State, Donald Redford. Although she misses some important scholarly voices, especially Edwin Yamauchi's work on the Scythians and Persians (I'm rather biased since he's my mentor), she consults a host of others, such as Cyrus Gordon (Yamauchi's mentor), Kenneth Kitchen, A. Leo Oppenheim, and Thorkild Jacobsen. (However, she overlooks Jacobsen's wonderful Treasures of Darkness—a dialogue on the original Mesopotamian texts worthy of Bauer's insightful attention.)
Ancient history has a way of turning up in curious guises. Not long ago I entered a packed lecture hall in the Natural History Building at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and two history interns had welcomed me with the following phrase scribbled large across several chalkboards—"MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN, Creationism Is Death! Evolutionism Is Life!" Perhaps they knew a religious conference was renting their space, or that Edwin Yamauchi was my mentor. Nonetheless, they seemed unaware that this very passage describing Belshazzar's Feast (Daniel 5:1-4), once considered as evidence of a biblical error, actually supports its veracity. The History of the Ancient World reveals the strong corroboration of the biblical account with primary sources. What sounds counter-intuitive on the surface, since Belshazzar's father Nabonidus was the official king, is quite plausible in the light of the many intrigues Bauer creatively captures.
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