What books would you recommend to learn about ancient mesopotamia

by Mr-Mystery20

Im very interested in reading about the it but not sure what books I should look into I'm interested in books with pictures and illustrations in general and of course writings kind like your usual history book from school Thanks for your input

Himantolophus

The Ark Before Noah by Irving Finkel. He's the assistant keeper of Ancient Mesopotamia at the British Museum and the book is ostensibly about the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh but is really an opportunity for him to geek out about Cuneiform.

Bentresh

The best place to start is with the AskHistorians reading list, which has a fair number of introductory books on ancient Mesopotamia.

The recently published The Sumerians by Paul Collins should be added to the section on Sumer and is a very readable introduction. I should also add The First Great Powers: Babylon and Assyria by Arthur Cotterell, which is arguably the most readable history of Mesopotamia at the moment, although it focuses much too heavily on the 1st millennium BCE and wholly ignores some of the earlier periods like the Old Assyrian period (ca. 2000-1750 BCE).

Michael Roaf's Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (free PDF) is probably your best bet if you'd like a book with a lot of illustrations and maps. It's now badly dated in places, particularly the sections on Syria and Anatolia, but it's still very useful.