What books to include in an ancient world history library?

After doing enough research of ancient civilizations and taking one class on all of them, these are the best books in my opinion that give a general overview to start with when researching, depending on the civilization you are researching. Then once you have these and look through them, you can make a good library of least 350 books about the ancient world like I have. I hope this helps and if you want help picking books, just ask. Also these books are written by the authorities in their subjects so they will be good research materials.

Ancient Rome: Christopher Mackay’s Ancient Rome: A Military and Political History

Ancient Greece: Sarah Pomeroy’s Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History

Ancient Mesopotamia: Marc Van De Mieroop’s A History of Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt: Marc Van De Mieroop’s A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 - 323 BC

Ancient Phoenicia: Maria Aubet’s The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade

Ancient Carthage: Dexter Hoyo’s The Carthaginians (Peoples of the Ancient World)

Ancient Hellenistic World: R. Malcom Errington’s A History of the Hellenistic World: 323 - 30 Bc

Ancient Silk Road Area: Xinru Liu’s The Silk Road in World History (The New Oxford World History)

Ancient Persia: Maria Brosius’ The Persians (Peoples of the Ancient World)

Ancient Hittites: O.R. Gurney’s The Hittites

Here are some books to consider on the Ancient Near East-I've prioritized editions of primary sources, texts on cultural things, and things that aren't specialty series volumes(assuming you don't want to blow your budget on StBoT/RIMA/Acta Iranica/whatever hyperspecialised topic volumes)

Anthologies of texts

-*Benjamin Foster, Before the Muses: An anthology of Akkadian literature, probably the most comprehensive English collection of Akkadian literary texts and covers a wide range of genres.

-*SBL Writings from the Ancient World series: This is a collection of anthologies of primary sources arranged thematically; they translate a very wide range of texts and the volumes are very affordably priced-a rarity in this field! The translations are done by the best scholars in the field, so they are generally solid and reliable translations.

General overview texts:

-*Karen Radner, ed, The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture and Sharon Steadman, ed, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia. Both of these are fantastic overviews of the ancient world; they collect essays on a very wide range of topics by leading scholars in the field, so your students will have useful starting points for many areas, and the bibliography for each essay is through and very useful as a research aid for your students.

-Cambridge Ancient History, a very comprehensive series of volumes on ancient history, and probably the best "one-stop shop" for starting research.

-*Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East. If your students are anything like me, they'll get swamped by all the odd place names-how to keep Nuzi and Nippur straight?-and this is a nice detailed atlas of the cultural geography of the ancient Near East.

Specialized topical volumes

-Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander, probably the most prominent currently available one-volume history of the Persian Empire; although it has been critiqued for improperly neglecting Greek sources it is enormous and extensively researched and a very valuable overview of every imaginable topic on the Achaemenian Empire.

-Josef Weishofer, Ancient Persia. A less detailed overview, but one that covers a wider chronological range

-Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of Hittites and The World of Syro-Hittite Kingdoms, useful one-volume introductions to the Hittite Empire and the states that emerged in the aftermath of its breakup.

-Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy of the Second Millenium BCE; this is a little different than the other volumes; it's the catalog to an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum a few years ago with a lot of very interesting discussion of art in the second millennium BCE and it's very useful I think for both looking at material culture and art and setting Babylonia in its broader regional context.

Hopefully this is useful along with /u/Mastertrout22's list; it's not a comprehensive bibliography of the Ancient Near East(there are entire research libraries devoted to the field) but hopefully it's a useful list of things that could plausibly be of use to high schoolers and are within the budget of a school library.

Since you're interested in helping your students with research papers, you may also want to develop a list of good internet resources on the ancient world. I don't know very much about online classics, but there are a lot of fantastic online resources for the study of the ancient near east. A considerable number of them are aggregated under the Online Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus(http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/); in addition the website Etana(http://www.etana.org/about) collects a wide range of resources on the study of the ancient Near East and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago(https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/catalog/) makes quite a few of its publications available online for free. Some of these are mostly useful for very high-level and focused research, but many of them will be useful to your students and you may find a lot of the more focused materials useful for lesson plans and the like.

EDIT: I've starred the ones that i would consider higher-priority, since some of these are just personal interests of mine that might easily be passed over. LATE LATE LATE EDIT #2. How did I forget Frankfort's The Art and Architecture of The Ancient Orient, which is still the most detailed 1-volume overview of the art of the ancient Near East? Just make sure you get the newest edition possible, since that'll have detailed notes on discoveries made since Frankfort's day.