Back in 1967, the scholar A. Leo Oppenheim published a book filled with more reader-friendly samples of ancient Mesopotamian letters, which go some length toward bringing to life the everyday commotion, raiding, warfare, religion, commerce and political wrangling of those times. These letters were written in ancient Mesopotamia and beyond, in old Assyrian trading colonies in Anatolia and by kings in Canaan and Syria exchanging word with their liege, either the Hittite king or the Egyptian Pharaoh (Akkadian cuneiform was the universal diplomatic language of the bronze age). Here's the free PDF from the Oriental Institute of Chicago: Letters From Mesopotamia: Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia The amount of cuneiform tablets (not to speak of petty fragments) uncovered by archaeologists during the last two centuries amount to well over 100'000, with probably more than a million tablets still in the ground. The sheer information preserved is enormous, and Assyriologists will have translation work to keep them occupied for many hundreds of years to come. However, vast though this clay treasure is, it is not the liveliest of ancient source material by a long shot. Writing started out as book keeping, and it shows in the Mesopotamian letters. When writing became used for more versatile tasks than keeping count of wares, it retained a stilted and formal manner, upheld by rigorous tradition in prestigious scribal schools over many centuries. The sheer age of Mesopotamian writing means that it's boring, dry and business-like, but pretty interesting at times nonetheless. You will have to search out ancient Greek authors to find some sort of lively language developed in old writing! I would like to share some of the more interesting Mesopotamian letters with you, should anyone wish to read it. Letters from Mesopotamia presents a cherry-picked collection of more or less intact clay tablet letters. There are a lot of bureaucratic stuff, some law cases, omen-gazing and lots of merchant letters. There are royal correspondence and military letters. There are glimpses of disease and calamities, of convoluted ritual practices and There are also personal disputes where the heated tempers of folk shine through the formal words. And there are some astonishing amount of flattery from the Pharaoh's Canaanite vassals to their boss. How would you like it to be addressed like this at the start of a letter? Or like this? Sufficiently crawling in the dust? An important form of taxation in ancient Mesopotamia was corvée labour: Digging canals, building structures and doing other work for the state. Several letters are for fighting the bureaucracy: Others are plain old nagging: Some bear witness to the despair of human misery: Hardship, indeed, on a large scale. It is easy to imagine the chaos, the fear, the sweaty efforts and the barking masters during raids and warfare: What is the worth of a man? Back in those days, they could give the exact market value! Theft is eternal: Vehicle worries are no novelty: And neither is human cruelty. Anyone else think of Hobgoblins upon reading this? War was always a popular pastime: Enjoy your luxury fridge! Having ice for drinks was the mark of wealthy and important families, since it had to be extracted with simple hand tools in mountainous areas during winter, then be packaged to minimize melting and then be transported to the customer. Activities of this sort might well take place in the lower reaches of the northwesterly Mountains of Mourns to provide Chaos Dwarf palaces with chilly drinks: Sometimes the Pharaoh has need of your daughter and your possessions: Better keep those solders and chariotry in good order, or else...! Kingly wrath clad in sayings: Rule of arms and fear: Paying homage to Assyrian overlords carried its share of dangers: A glimpse of the administrated recruitment that kept the Assyrian war machine churning: To be a subject king to a greater king was often a stormy affair where one wrong step could plunge the underling to his doom, and never more so than when the very guts of the overlords you had to serve were commonly hated, with that bile spilling over on you for subjecting yourself to their yoke: Likewise, fire was a danger that would not go away: Interpreting omens were part of how people conducted their everyday business: The best letter of them all is however one where the formal introduction of diplomatic letters is turned on its head by the stark tidings next presented, courtesy of Nergal. Is all well?