This volume is the outcome of a 2014 symposium with the ambitious goal to understand the “essence of West Asian civilization” (p. v). After an introduction, it has four sections: “Environment and People,” “Great Transformations,” “Urbanization,” and “Cultural Heritage,” as well as a final synthesis chapter. The wide scope embraces resources, climate, geography, cities, writing, religion, and issues in heritage and conservation.

Akira Tsuneki's introduction offers a compelling argument for use of “West/Western Asia” rather than “Middle East,” but he avoids tackling the equally problematic term “civilization.” He proposes to initiate a new discipline, “the study of Ancient West Asian Civilization” (p. 1), which will promote this region as the source of crucial innovations and the foundation of the modern Western world. But this framing is not new; Samuel Kramer's History Begins at Sumer already set the stage in 1956. Most scholars studying this region currently avoid this approach because it presents connection to Western society as the reason to study ancient Western Asia, rather than the fascinating intricacy of the cultures themselves within their own context. However, most of the authors ignore the modern connection and instead tackle the important innovations of peoples in ancient West Asia.

The deep temporal scope and details on geology, resources, and climate make the comprehensive environment section very useful. Ken-ichiro Hisada's chapter describes plate tectonics and geologic formation processes before addressing stones and metals used in the Paleolithic through Bronze Ages. There is some overlap with the chapter by Seyed Aghanabani, who describes the topography and geography of western and central Asia, and then focuses on coal, gas, and oil. Ryo Anma and Teruyuki Maruoka's description of paleoclimate changes since the Pleistocene effectively connects these to large-scale human responses, migration, domestication, and urbanization. Tsuneo Ohsumi and Yuji Yagi's article on seismic activity is tightly focused on an AD 365 event in Crete but is a reminder of the potentially devastating effects of earthquakes in this geologically active region.

The “Transformations” section covers the origins of agropastoralism and metallurgy. A detailed chapter on plant domestication (Ken-ichi Tanno and Osamu Maeda) convincingly describes this phenomenon as an extended multilocation process. Hans-Peter Uerpmann and Margarethe Uerpmann analyze animal domestication and commodification in the same vein, as an extended nonlinear process with many nodes and many causes. Ünsal Yalçin's chapter on metal resources outlines the increasing artifactual, technological, and socioeconomic complexity of metal production—from Neolithic experiments with colored minerals to Bronze Age industry. These chapters, on processes that commenced with unknown outcomes, celebrate human curiosity and ingenuity.

The “Urbanization” section has strong individual chapters but lacks cohesion. Jason Ur frames the development of cities as the consequence of household evolution and expansion, preceded by unsuccessful experiments lacking the diversity or density of cities. Jonathan Taylor covers the origins and technology of writing and briefly addresses the impact of Mesopotamian mathematics and astronomy on the modern world. Jun Ikeda and Shigeo Yamada also describe writing's origins but mainly contrast early Mesopotamian and Japanese writing in terms of logosyllabic principles and phonetic values. Uri Gabbay explores the flexibility and diversity of religious beliefs and practices evidenced by myths and interactions with cult statues. The interconnections among text, knowledge, and social complexity make a thin thread that runs through these chapters but is underdeveloped. The final section raises important issues in conservation and cultural heritage preservation, but it is unrelated to the rest of the volume. Yoko Taniguchi's Afghanistan case study ranges across iconoclasm, cultural cleansing, and problems of conservation and reconstruction. Stavroula Golfomitsou, Thilo Rehren, and Christian Eckmann describe conservation, object biography, and crafting via examples of iron weapons and an Egyptian statue.

The solid synthesis chapter by Timothy Harrison returns to the connections between ancient western Asia and the modern world and to the region as a major birthplace of civilization. He brings in issues of physical and social advantages, accidental events, and a “social development index” (p. 226) while arguing for the importance of the past to the present, especially in terms of human-generated climate change and the role of cultural diplomacy in conflict. A short wrap-up by the editors follows. The time depth and wide geographic range of many chapters make for useful introductions to aspects of western Asia, especially in the first two sections. However, there is little connection among chapters, and there are significant overlaps in content. For a volume that aims to develop a new and comprehensive study of past culture, several important themes are missing—for example, production or consumption of art or ceramics. The focus is tightly on the underlying environment and resources and on relatively early developments in economy and settlement, omitting the mature city-states and empires of the second and first millennia BC. Ultimately, this book is an interesting but diffuse collection, with some interesting chapters in it, but this coedited volume—as a whole—falls somewhat short of its lofty goal.