Weavers, Scribes, and Kings

A New History of the Ancient Near East

De: Amanda H. Podany

Narrado por: Amanda H. Podany

In this sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Amanda Podany takes listeners on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to brickmakers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that people faced over time are explored through their own written words and the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived.

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings creates a tapestry of life stories through which listeners will come to know individuals from many walks of life, and to understand their places within the broad history of events and institutions in the ancient Near East. These stories are preserved on ancient clay tablets, which allow us to trace, for example, the career of a weaver as she advanced to become a supervisor of a workshop, listen to a king trying to persuade his generals to prepare for a siege, and feel the pain of a starving couple and their four young children as they suffered through a time of famine. What might seem at first glance to be a remote and inaccessible ancient culture proves to be a comprehensible world, one that bequeathed to the modern world many of our institutions and beliefs, a fascinating place to visit.

©2022 Oxford University Press (P)2023 Tantor

Insightful look into lives in the Ancient Near East

This is by far the best audiobook on the Ancient Near East. The author tells the history of the region from the 4th millennium BC to the Persian conquest by giving us snapshots of people’s lives throughout the time frame. These are told from the cuneiform tablets found and show the amazing details about those lives that can be deduced from these tablets. So one gets both a sense of the larger sweep of the history combined with an intimate portrait of the lives of specific individuals. The narration is enhanced by the author herself (an eminent scholar in the field) performing it. She has a very pleasing and warm voice. Highly recommended.

Tour de force

A real gem for amateur historians/sociologists. The prose never falters and is nothing less than entrancing. For myself the greatest literary work can be ruined by the narrator. For this she endlessly charming.

I hate history, however….

This audiobook is absolutely great. I struggle with history but I’d like to understand it. Most books are just a shotgun blast of events and people with very little insight to the actual human behind the events and people, and their relationships and influences to each other.


This book is different. It gives a peak to these people’s lives in a way that I feel like I am starting to know them. The authors is genuinely interested in the topic.

It made me wonder how much and what will be available of our lives for future generations. It made me think of trying to preserve my own story.

Clever use of original source material brings the past to life

Letting identifiable people who lived thousands of years ago speak for themselves provides a brilliant insight into the lives hopes and concerns people from all walks of life. So much more engaging than traditional history’s which tend to focus on key characters and “big”events.

The Life of Cuneiform Script

The world needed this book. This is by far the best history I have read of the ancient Near East. Much of the content of this book had previously seemed to me to be lost to time. My searches for Sumerian history lead me to Samuel Noah Kramer’s books from several generations ago. Links between the phonetic alphabet and Cuneiform or other languages seldom bridge the academic- general interest gap. Much of the history of the region is too narrowly focused on biblical history and misses the broader context.

Amanda Podany shines the light of day on a random grouping of people whose property deeds or contracts have been buried for three thousand years. From these random and obscure snapshots of inconsequential lives she cobbles together a comprehensive and tightly woven narrative that spans somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 years.

This history is made spectacular due to Podany’s ability to draw from details of daily lives as wide-ranging as the individual weavers, merchants, priestesses and kings, all prospering from trade in fine textiles. These details breathe life into the dawn of human civilization.

I can’t speak highly enough about this revelatory book and Amanda Podany’s contribution to an underrepresented history.

Ingeniously organized, impeccably read

This is one of the rare scholarly books on ancient history that can be enjoyed by the non-scholar.
The author uses the large caches of cuneiform tablets that we have unearthed over the last two centuries as the organizing principle, but she doesn't stick to only the royalty, generals and priestesses. She gives us a vibrant picture of the everyday lives of skilled artisans, slaves, and the very scribes whose chronicles have lasted more than 4,000 years.

A note on the narration: the author reads her own book, so there is no faltering over complex ancient names. AND she has a delightful voice with something like the BBC Standard British accent which so soothes American listeners.

Loved the new discoveries included

This book was so comprehensive. It included the latest archaeological discoveries and corrected much of what we previously knew about the people living in the ancient Middle East. Specifically, we were so wrong about the names of famous kings. I enjoyed the authors writing and will certainly take a second listen!

Incredibly detailed, fascinating storytelling

You get an excellent feel for what life was like back then for ordinary people. Yes, the Mesopotamians deserve credit for recording EVERYTHING, but Dr Podany has also done a stellar job bringing their arcane administrative world to life in vivid detail. This is not a mere retelling of the records. She's also woven in vast amounts of secondary scholarship, anthropology and history to give context and meaning to otherwise dry bureaucratic records.

Awesome and informative!

The narration was clear and easy to understand. A different approach to a subject, which is usually presented in a stiff academic fashion. I thoroughly enjoyed listening!

An excellent overview

A great introduction to the culture and society of the ancient near east. Not perfect for being able to get a sense of the macro historical timeline, but nonetheless insightful and detailed as a means of understanding the microhistory of individual lives.