The Mesopotamian Riddle
An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing
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The Mesopotamian Riddle
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Narrated by:
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Matthew Lloyd Davies
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By:
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Joshua Hammer
About this listen
A rollicking adventure starring three free-spirited Victorians on a twenty-year quest to decipher cuneiform, the oldest writing in the world—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.
It was one of history’s great vanishing acts.
Around 3,400 BCE—as humans were gathering in complex urban settlements—a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For three millennia, wedge shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon and of Persia’s mighty Achaemenid Empire, along with precious minutiae about everyday life in the cradle of civilization. And then…the meaning of the characters was lost.
London, 1857. In an era obsessed with human progress, mysterious palaces emerging from the desert sands had captured the Victorian public’s imagination. Yet Europe’s best philologists struggled to decipher the bizarre inscriptions excavators were digging up.
Enter a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave British military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher this script that would enable them to peek farther back into human history than ever before.
From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, The Mesopotamian Riddle whisks you on a wild adventure through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand our past.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2025 Joshua Hammer (P)2025 Simon & Schuster AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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- A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Search for the Perfect Bird
- By: Joshua Hammer
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 150
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 128
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 128
On May 3, 2010, an Irish national named Jeffrey Lendrum was apprehended at Britain’s Birmingham International Airport with a suspicious parcel strapped to his stomach. Inside were 14 rare peregrine falcon eggs snatched from a remote cliffside in Wales. So begins a tale almost too bizarre to believe, following the parallel lives of a globe-trotting smuggler who spent two decades capturing endangered raptors worth millions of dollars as race champions - and Detective Andy McWilliam, who’s hell bent on protecting the world’s birds of prey.
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1 out of 5 stars
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What a crock of B.S.
- By Joe on 03-31-20
By: Joshua Hammer
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Red Scare
- Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America
- By: Clay Risen
- Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
- Length: 15 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 23
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 23
An urgent, accessible, and important history, Red Scare reveals an all-too-familiar pattern of illiberal conspiracy-mongering and political and cultural backlash that speaks directly to the antagonism and divisiveness of our contemporary moment. Drawing upon newly declassified documents, journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Very disappointing narrator
- By DB on 04-19-25
By: Clay Risen
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The Fifteen
- Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America
- By: William Geroux
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 7
The revelatory true story of the long-forgotten POW camps for German soldiers erected in hundreds of small U.S. towns during World War II, and the secret Nazi killings that ensnared fifteen brave American POWs in a high-stakes showdown.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A part of American history I’d never heard about
- By Janet Stanek on 05-13-25
By: William Geroux
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The Determined Spy
- The Turbulent Life and Times of CIA Pioneer Frank Wisner
- By: Douglas Waller
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 19 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 8
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 8
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 8
An intimate and expertly researched biography of little-known early CIA leader Frank Wisner, whose behind-the-scenes influence on Cold War policy—and hundreds of highly secret anti-Soviet missions—resonates with the international crises we see today.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Essential For Understanding The Cold War
- By Demetrius Walker on 05-13-25
By: Douglas Waller
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Out of the Darkness
- The Story of Mary Ellen Wilson: 150th Anniversary Edition
- By: Eric A. Shelman, Stephen Lazoritz M.D.
- Narrated by: Eric A. Shelman
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
It's now been over 150 years since ASPCA agents, at the direction of founder Henry Bergh, rescued little Mary Ellen Wilson from her abusive New York tenement home back in 1874. It's also been over 25 years since Eric A. Shelman and Stephen Lazoritz, M.D. released Out of the Darkness: The Story of Mary Ellen Wilson, which remains the only book about the little girl's case.
By: Eric A. Shelman, and others
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Drunk on Genocide
- Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History)
- By: Edward B. Westermann
- Narrated by: Kevin Meyer
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated "performative masculinity," expressly linked to physical or sexual violence.
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Rot
- An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
- By: Padraic X. Scanlan
- Narrated by: Stephen Hogan
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 11
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 10
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Story4 out of 5 stars 10
In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate. In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Really great work of history
- By Anonymous User on 04-12-25
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Soldiers and Silver
- Mobilizing Resources in the Age of Roman Conquest
- By: Michael J. Taylor
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3 out of 5 stars 1
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 1
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Story3 out of 5 stars 1
By the middle of the second century BCE, after nearly one hundred years of warfare, Rome had exerted its control over the entire Mediterranean world, forcing the other great powers of the region—Carthage, Macedonia, Egypt, and the Seleucid empire—to submit militarily and financially. But how, despite its relative poverty and its frequent numerical disadvantage in decisive battles, did Rome prevail? Michael J. Taylor explains this surprising outcome by examining the role that manpower and finances played.
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The Shortest History of France
- From Roman Gaul to Revolution and Cultural Radiance: A Global Story for Our Times
- By: Colin Jones
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
As nationalism and anti-immigration rhetoric surge in France (and elsewhere), The Shortest History of France presents a portrait of a nation whose politics and society have always been shaped by global forces. Grounded in up-to-date historical scholarship that avoids the traps of national exceptionalism, Jones reminds us that it was only after the first millennium of French history that a nation-state began to emerge.
By: Colin Jones
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Mediterranean Sweep
- The USAAF in the Italian Campaign
- By: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
- Narrated by: Christopher Ragland
- Length: 15 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 1
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 1
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Story5 out of 5 stars 1
With the defeat of the Germans and Italians on Sicily in mid-July 1943, the focus of the war in the air shifted toward the battle for the Italian mainland itself. This campaign took place in the context of the coming invasion of northwest Europe, with many of the best units from the North African and Sicilian campaigns withdrawn to prepare for the new front, while those units that remained had a lower priority for replacements of men and material.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Mediterranean Sweep
- By Ross Gordon on 03-27-25
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The Spoils of Time
- A World History from the Dawn of Civilization Through the Early Renaissance
- By: C. V. Wedgwood
- Narrated by: Charlton Griffin
- Length: 17 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
The Spoils of Time is a concise history of the world in nine chapters, tracing the prehistoric beginnings of early man’s halting steps towards civilization and ending sometime around 1500. The scope is vast, with Wedgwood’s scholarship spanning all the continents. As the author states, her purpose was to create a continuous narrative of human history for her own pleasure and to find out for herself what, if any, interlacing relations might hold us together.
By: C. V. Wedgwood
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Inventing the Renaissance
- The Myth of a Golden Age
- By: Ada Palmer
- Narrated by: Candida Gubbins
- Length: 30 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 5
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 5
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Story5 out of 5 stars 5
From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Completely changed my perspective of Machiavelli
- By Amazon Customer on 04-30-25
By: Ada Palmer
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The Kalinka Affair
- A Father's Hunt for His Daughter's Killer
- By: Joshua Hammer
- Narrated by: Joshua Hammer
- Length: 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 7
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Performance3 out of 5 stars 6
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Story4 out of 5 stars 5
When André Bamberski's daughter died 30 years ago, he was helpless to save her. Suspicions of murder began to surround her stepfather, a German doctor named Dieter Krombach, but Bamberski could only hope the truth would prevail. But when the authorities gave up their pursuit, he knew he had to act. So against the odds, Bamberski embarked on an obsessive quest to capture and punish his daughter's killer. In this riveting true story by Joshua Hammer, a father travels to the limits of law in search of justice.
By: Joshua Hammer
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Spooks
- The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents
- By: Jim Hougan
- Narrated by: William Sarris
- Length: 19 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
A classic of investigative reporting, Spooks is a treasure trove of who-shot-who research on the metastasis of the United States intelligence community, whose practices and personnel have engulfed the larger society. Teeming with tales of wiremen, hitmen, and mobsters; crooked politicians and corrupt cops going about their business of regime-change, union-busting, wiretapping, money laundering, and industrial espionage, learn about: Richard Nixon's "Mission Impossible" war on Aristotle Onassis; not-so-deep-fake porno films starring the CIA's enemies; and much more.
By: Jim Hougan
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Prester John: Africa's Lost King (The Search for the Last Messiah of Christendom)
- By: Richard Denham
- Narrated by: Virtual Voice
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
He sits on his jewelled throne on the Horn of Africa in the maps of the sixteenth century. He can see his whole empire reflected in a mirror outside his palace. He carries three crosses into battle and each cross is guarded by one hundred thousand men. He was with St Thomas in the third century when he set up a Christian church in India. He came like a thunderbolt out of the far East eight centuries later, to rescue the crusaders clinging on to Jerusalem. And he was still there when Portuguese explorers went looking for him in the fifteenth century. He went by different names. The priest ...
By: Richard Denham
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The McKinley Years
- The Life and Times of Our 25th President
- By: Christopher Kenney
- Narrated by: Scott R. McKinley
- Length: 3 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
The McKinley Years: The Life and Times of our 25th President utilizes the rich resources of the McKinley Presidential Library & Museum archives. Through photos and documents only available at the museum, Christopher Kenney paints a picture of not only William McKinley the President but William McKinley the man. This book explores McKinley's early years, service in the Civil War, family life, and his rise from lawyer to Congressman, to Governor, and finally to the highest office in the land.