Living in the shadow of a ziggurat

January 7, 2015 2:32 PM

I've been listening to ancient Babylonian and Sumerian music, and would like to further immerse myself in this world, fictionally. What can I find as far as fiction (alt-hist, hist-fic, etc.) set in pre-Abrahamic Mesopotamia?
posted by dmd to Writing & Language (9 answers total)

A nice translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh is where I'd start.
posted by empath at 2:35 PM on January 7, 2015 [4 favorites]

Best answer: There's Between the Rivers by Harry Turtledove, which is also playing with Julian Jayne's bicameral mind hypothesis.
posted by solitary dancer at 3:09 PM on January 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: And I have not read them myself, but there is also the Eskkar series by Sam Barone.
posted by solitary dancer at 3:16 PM on January 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think it's pre-Abrahamic: Gore Vidal's "Creation", a memoir by the grandson of Zoroaster in which he is raised at the court of Darius, is a mate of Xerxes, meets Gautama and Confucius and ends up retiring in Perikles' Athens
posted by runincircles at 3:18 PM on January 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Gilgamesh remixed in a far-future Brazilian arcology:
The Summer Prince by Dawn Alaya Johnson
posted by Jesse the K at 7:05 PM on January 7, 2015

Poems of Heaven and Hell is remarkably readable and exciting. It was the first epic poem I ever read and more like reading a short novel sung aloud.
posted by viggorlijah at 7:06 PM on January 7, 2015

Robert Silverberg wrote his take on Gilgamesh in Gilgamesh the King

L. Sprague DeCamp's The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate is set in reign of King Xerxes I.
posted by fings at 7:26 PM on January 7, 2015

Lol, I've actually walked through the Ishtar Gate (it's from Babylon, named for the city at the other end of the road that leads out of it, and currently in Berlin)...

Snow Crash by Neal Stevenson (sci-fi), while set like, now-ish, and written in the mid-90s (hey everybody lets goggle into the metaverse and ride digital motorcycles!) has a lot of major subplots about Babylon, Sumeria, the tower of Babel, neurolinguistics, Cuneiform, etc etc.
posted by sexyrobot at 9:07 PM on January 7, 2015

Several parts of Samuel R. Delany's Nevèrÿon series, while not literally set in historical Mesopotamia, has, I think, some of the right feel and concerns.
posted by Jasper Fnorde at 10:13 AM on January 8, 2015