About the Author

Jean Bott�ro is the emeritus director of l'�cole Pratique des Hautes �tudes, quatri�me section, Paris. He is the author of The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia; Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, and coauthor of Ancestor of the West: Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in the Ancient Near East, all published by the University of Chicago Press. Teresa Lavender Fagan has translated more than a dozen books for the University of Chicago Press.