ASHURBANIPAL'S RIDDLE

From the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and The Falcon Thief, a hilarious journey into the world of an ancient writing system.

Josh sets out on another rollicking adventure as he follows four eccentric 19th century British archeologists and linguists and their 20-year quest to decipher cuneiform, the oldest writing system in the world. The four set out to recover the secrets of the sophisticated civilizations and mighty kings that rose and fell along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers during the Early Bronze Age.

Cuneiform: the wedged-shaped characters used in the ancient writing systems of Mesopotamia, Persia, and Ugarit, surviving mainly impressed on clay tablets.

The book beings in a mud-walled village near the Euphrates River in what is now Iraq, 5,300 years ago when a merchant-scribe used a reed on the riverbank and carved a crude symbol into a slab of wet clay. The symbol served as a record of a deal for livestock or another commodity. Over time, the most complex versions of this logo-syllabic script - consisting of wedges and arrows - developed 1,600 symbols. Different cultures accorded these symbols different meanings and sounds and the script became the common writing system of the Middle East for the next two thousand years - then, mysteriously, it disappeared. Until four British archeologists and linguists set out to re-discover the ancient scripts and recover the secrets of long-ago civilizations of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

Ashurbanipal's Riddle will be an archaeological and intellectual thriller, ranging from the colorful bazaars of nineteenth-century Baghdad to the stately galleries of the British Museum, and filled with driven individuals, bitter rivalries, intricate puzzle-solving, and hair raising adventures.

Joshua Hammer is an award-winning journalist who previously served as Newsweek's bureau chief in Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Cape Town. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in reporting in 2003, and won the award, for his writing about the Ebola crisis in West Africa, in 2016. He is also the author of five non-fiction books, including The New York Times bestseller, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and The Falcon .