Some Mesopotamian Challenges: A History Based on Tablets Unevenly Distributed in Time and Space

The more than three millennia of ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, yearly augmented by new finds from sites across the Middle East, provide a unique and at times extremely detailed historical record. The information, however, is very unevenly distributed in time and space - as illuminating ‘flashes’ rather than comprehensive overviews. In this article the authors draw on cuneiform sources from sites in early second Millennium Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia to exemplify the challenges which even very rich material pose to modern scholars, challenges which we believe will remain even as the cuneiform record inevitably grows substantially in the future.