Remembering and Forgetting in Ancient Mesopotamia: Ziggurats, Royal Sculpture, and the Shaping of the Akkadian Legacy During the Ur III Period

by Marian H. Feldman

184 pages, Hardcover

Published January 21, 2026

About the author

Marian H. Feldman is Professor of the History of Art and Near Eastern Studies at The Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

[Jack Naylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice, compact study of the Ur III reception of Akkad. She explores the ways that 21st-millennium BC kings curated and rewrote the history of the Akkadian empire through inscriptional and architectural modifications. Feldman's work is a little front-loaded with theory, but I love seeing phenomenology (via Böhme) incorporated here. Her desire to think of architecture as constitutive of our pre-reflective understanding of the environment is interesting and worth applying elsewhere. Certainly, the best part of the book is when she explores the features of Akkadian statuary and seeks an explanation for why the Ur III kings preserved it even as they destroyed their architectural remains. Per her argument, I am fairly convinced that there is something unique about the physicality of the human body in Akkadian art that makes it a particularly potent expression of the authority concentrated in the king, a potency the Ur III state found worth preserving.