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- The original comment is almost certainly thinking of https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199858683/ (Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East).
It's a very good book.
A minor theme is indeed that Mesopotamian city-kings had a hard time trading with Egypt. Mesopotamia seems to have produced mostly textiles, which Egypt made domestically. What Egypt needed from international trade was copper and wood.
All the Mesopotamian city-kings wanted gold, though, which came from Egypt. They could get this one time, by marrying a daughter to the Pharaoh. We have an example of Pharaonic correspondence with a king who repeatedly asked for unworked gold, finally sent a daughter over, received a mountain of gold in return, and concluded by complaining that the gold had been worked (into statues).
I assume many of those statues got melted down.
There is some discussion in https://www.amazon.com/dp/0670022667/ (Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization) of how the Phoenician city-states of the bronze age (source of cedar wood to Egypt) gradually succumbed over the centuries to Assyrian empire-building. It's not the main focus of the book though.
- Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1780747411/
Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195313984/
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the Economy Bigger https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691136408/
The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG3JMD0/
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature https://www.amazon.com/dp/0670031518/
- Here are a few that come to mind right now:
Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East by Amanda H Podany - Covers how international relations worked between the different rulers of the Ancient Near East. Covers different things and in a different way than I had heard in a lot of other ANE history.
Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos by Jonah Keri - Lots of fun, interesting stuff about a sport I like and a team I didn't know too much about.
Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World by Noel Malcolm - This one is really good, covering the history of a single family amidst the relationships between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian world.
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox - Another excellent book, this discussing how Linear B was deciphered, with particular emphasis placed on Alice Kober, whose work was largely overlooked since she died before Michael Ventris ultimately deciphered it.
The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 by Alan Taylor - This one won the Pulitzer for history in 2014, so that should tell you something. This book covers an aspect of history I had never heard before, with a lot of focus on slaves themselves, rather than their owners or the people around them. The roles of the British as liberators and slaves as their aids in the War of 1812 is very interesting.
And one last one that I'm currently reading is Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire by Peter H. Wilson. I haven't finished it yet, so take this with a grain of salt, but it's very interesting to hear about a large aspect of European history I wasn't too familiar with and that doesn't fit into the neat, centralized nation-state based history of the world that is predominantly taught.
- There's an interesting anti-parallel to ancient mesopotamian history. From the superlative book Brotherhood of Kings ( http://www.amazon.com/Brotherhood-Kings-International-Relati... ):
> Mari holds the key to much of our knowledge of this era. The site of Babylon has physically sunk over the years so that now the palace and archives of Hammurabi are below the water table and, presumably, reduced to mud
> As in the case of Ebla, the vast archive of thousands of documents from eighteenth-century [BC] Mari is preserved because the palace burned down. [...] Because of this, it is possible to read, in some of the letters baked and buried in the conflagration, about Hammurabi's relations with Mari in happier times.
Our documents from that period come from conquering kings who, in their zeal to raze enemy cities, forever preserved those cities' records. Literature wasn't as much of a presence then as it is now (tablets run to accounting and correspondence), but it (and history) existed; cf the epic of Gilgamesh.
