The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion

It's not easy to read. It has a lot of interesting information.

The stories and poems are vague and you'd need a degree in religion to understand them.

a very interesting book!!!! well worth the price to read and share it!!!!

The roots of belief and our human behavior adapting to the need to believe.

Written poorly. Exceedingly boring!!!!!!!! I'm sooo glad I looked it over before gifting it to a friend. Is it possible to give it fewer than one star????

Scholarly, worth the patient read if subject is of interest to you.

great condition, story is hard to follow :-)

I'm reading this book and is the best

Interesting, but the conclusions are based on old translations not always accurate (the book was published in 1976).I guess there must be some more updated book on this subject.

Gift

A bit dry although interesting.

This book shows its age, both in the absence of recent discoveries and in the author's approach. Jacobsen employed an evolutionary paradigm which was outdated even when he wrote. Thus he assumed that the earliest practice was "nature worship" and so took all texts that could be so interpreted as being early. Since he assigned their content to the pre-literary period, there is naturally no evidence to disprove him. Similarly, he assumed that "personal religion" must be late and pointed out how it's only referenced in later documents, forgetting that the later period simply has far more documents found in a wider variety of settings. Since religion is older than the state, personal religion cannot be late. But Jacobsen's definition of it involved "humility and self-abasement". One can certainly find that in Mesopotamia -- e.g. the "Penitential Psalms" -- but his frequent enthusiastic use of Biblical quotations makes one wonder how much of his interpretation was a projection of his own evangelical Protestantism. It's notable that the enthusiastic reviews of this book come from students of theology rather than of Assyrology or the phenomenology of religion. The best thing about the book is the quantity of quotations from original texts, but the beginning student will be better off with Schneider.

Arrived on time, in good used condition.