Rome and Greece fill most of the ancient history shelf. The civilisations that came before them, and the empires that rose beside them, get far less attention. Yet Uruk, Babylon, Nineveh and Persepolis shaped the whole ancient world, and the novels set there are some of the most unusual historical fiction you can read.
This list gathers the best of them, in historical order: from the first walled settlements of Mesopotamia and the legendary king of Uruk, through the Assyrian and Persian empires, to Babylonia under the Sasanian Persians. If you have read everything set in the Forum, start here.
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What Counts as Ancient Middle East Historical Fiction?
For this list, the ancient Middle East means novels set in these civilisations and periods:
- Mesopotamia from the first cities to the fall of Babylon (Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria), roughly 3000 BCE to 539 BCE
- The Achaemenid Persian Empire of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, 550 BCE to 330 BCE
- The Persian Empire’s fall to Alexander, where the story is told from inside Persia
- Late antique Mesopotamia under the Parthian and Sasanian Persians, up to the 4th century CE
Novels about Greeks fighting Persia from the Greek side live on our ancient Greece historical fiction and military historical fiction lists instead. Two superb novels set in later Persia, too late to count as ancient, have their own box below so they stay easy to find. For ancient Egypt, see our Wilbur Smith Egyptian Series reading order.
Quick Picks
| If you want | Read |
|---|---|
| The earliest setting of all | Dawn of Empire |
| A legendary queen | Babylonia |
| Battles and empire at their most brutal | The Assyrian |
| Big ideas and a Persian narrator | Creation |
| A mystery | The Ionia Sanction |
| Alexander through Persian eyes | The Persian Boy |
| A woman’s view of a famous march | The Lost Army |
The 11 Best Ancient Middle East Historical Fiction Novels
1. Dawn of Empire by Sam Barone (2006)
Setting: The village of Orak on the Tigris, around 3000 BCE
Dawn of Empire opens the Eskkar Saga in a world so early that cities themselves are still being invented. Eskkar, a barbarian warrior who now serves the farming village of Orak, learns that a huge horde of nomadic raiders is coming. With the help of Trella, a clever slave girl, he gambles everything on a new idea: a wall around the village.
This is adventure fiction first, fast and accessible, with sieges, fighting and a slow-burning partnership at its heart. What makes it stand out is the setting. There are no legions or knights here, only people working out how a settlement can defend itself and what kind of power a wall creates.
Perfect for: Readers who want military adventure and want to go as far back in history as fiction can take them.
2. Gilgamesh the King by Robert Silverberg (1984)
Setting: Uruk and the cities of Sumer, in the age of its legendary kings
Robert Silverberg, best known for science fiction, retells the oldest surviving story in the world as if Gilgamesh had written his own memoirs. The king of Uruk tells his story himself: a royal childhood, a dangerous rival for the throne, and the friendship with the wild man Enkidu that changes his life.
In his afterword, Silverberg explains that he tried to read the poem’s fantastic events realistically, as a historical novelist would. The result keeps the grandeur of the epic but grounds it in a recognisable Bronze Age city of temples, priestesses and rival kings.
Perfect for: Readers who know the Epic of Gilgamesh and want to see it as a novel, or who want a way into it.
3. Babylonia by Costanza Casati (2024)
Setting: The Neo-Assyrian Empire, 9th century BCE
Semiramis is one of the great legends of the ancient world, a queen whose story was told and retold by Greek writers centuries after her time. She is thought to be based on the real Assyrian queen Sammuramat. Costanza Casati’s novel follows her rise from the margins of the empire, an orphan with nothing who will not accept the place the world gives her.
Casati tells the story from several viewpoints, and the cast reaches from King Ninus and his closest companion Onnes down to Ribat, a young palace slave who serves as Semiramis’s eyes and ears while dreaming of becoming a scribe. Casati has said Ribat matters because so much of the novel is about what war does to people, including those who wield power. The novel came out in the UK in 2024 and in the US in January 2025.
Perfect for: Readers who love female-led myth and history, and fans of Madeline Miller who want to go further back in time. More picks like this are on our female lead historical fiction list.
4. The Assyrian by Nicholas Guild (1987)
Setting: The Assyrian Empire under Sennacherib, 7th century BCE
Tiglath Ashur is a son of King Sennacherib and a Greek captive. He grows up beside his half-brother Esarhaddon, his closest friend, and both love the same woman, Esharhamat, who is promised to whoever inherits the throne. Tiglath is the people’s favourite, but the omens point to Esarhaddon, and the rivalry that follows drives the whole novel.
Guild fictionalises the real succession at the Assyrian court and fills the book with campaigns and battles, which suits an empire famous for its armies. Kirkus called it a stunning historical epic, and it is not a gentle one: the violence and sex are frank. The story continues in The Blood Star (1989), which follows Tiglath into exile.
Perfect for: Readers who want a big, immersive epic and are fine with adult content.
5. Blood of Kings by Andrew James (2013)
Setting: The Persian Empire and Egypt, around 525 BCE
Andrew James gave up a career as a barrister to write this novel about the rise of Darius the Great. It covers the death of Cyrus the Great, the reign and death of his son Cambyses, and Darius’s path to the Persian throne, set against Persia’s invasion of Egypt in 525 BCE.
James was inspired by the Bisitun Inscription, the vast carving in which Darius told his own version of how he became king, and he traced the likely route of Cambyses’ army across the desert while researching. For readers who want the Achaemenid Empire from the inside, at the moment it was made, there are few other choices.
Perfect for: Readers who want Persian court intrigue and the early Achaemenid kings.
6. Creation by Gore Vidal (1981)
Setting: The Persian Empire, India, China and Athens, 5th century BCE
Cyrus Spitama, a fictional grandson of the prophet Zoroaster and a boyhood friend of Xerxes, has served Persia as an ambassador all his life. Now old and blind in Athens, he dictates his memoirs to his nephew Democritus, partly to correct what he heard in a public reading by Herodotus.
His travels take him to the courts of Darius and Xerxes, to India and to China, and he meets the great religious and philosophical teachers of his age along the way. The Greeks, usually the heroes of ancient history, look provincial through his Persian eyes, and that reversal is the book’s great pleasure. Creation is long and dense, with a huge cast, but it is one of the most ambitious historical novels ever written about the ancient world.
Perfect for: Readers who love big ideas, philosophy and a narrator with a sharp tongue.
7. The Ionia Sanction by Gary Corby (2011)
Setting: Ephesus and Magnesia in Persian-ruled Ionia, 5th century BCE
The second of Gary Corby’s Athenian Mysteries sends Nicolaos, a young investigator working for Pericles, across the Aegean. Thorion, the Athenian representative in Ephesus, has been found hanged with a note confessing that he betrayed his office, and Nicolaos suspects the scene was staged.
The trail leads to Magnesia and to Themistocles, the Athenian hero of the Persian Wars, now exiled and living under the protection of the Great King of Persia. Kirkus found it less a whodunit than a lively adventure, and the Greek world at the edge of the Persian Empire is the real draw. More crime set in the past is on our historical mystery fiction list.
Perfect for: Readers who want a lighter, faster mystery with the Persian Empire in the background.
8. The Lost Army by Valerio Massimo Manfredi (2007)
Setting: The march of the Ten Thousand across the Persian Empire, 401 BCE
In 401 BCE, ten thousand Greek mercenaries marched deep into Persia to fight for Cyrus the Younger, who wanted his brother’s throne. Xenophon told the story in the Anabasis, one of the most famous works of Greek literature. Manfredi, an Italian historian and archaeologist, retells it through the eyes of Abira, a young woman who follows Xenophon and the army.
That choice gives a well-known military epic a different heart: the reader sees the march, the battles and the long retreat home from among the people the army carries along with it. The Historical Novel Society praised its research. The English translation by Christine Feddersen-Manfredi appeared in 2008.
Perfect for: Readers who want an epic of survival with an unusual narrator. Military history fans should also try our military historical fiction list.
9. The Persian Boy by Mary Renault (1972)
Setting: The Persian Empire and Alexander’s campaigns, 4th century BCE
The second novel in Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy is told by Bagoas, the son of a Persian noble family. After his father’s enemies destroy his family, Bagoas is castrated and sold as a slave, and he becomes a favourite at the court of Darius III. When Alexander conquers Persia, Bagoas comes to serve him and becomes his companion.
Bagoas is proud of his Persian culture and often finds the Macedonians rough, and through him the conquest of Persia looks very different from the usual Greek account. Renault handles its difficult subjects with great tact. The trilogy begins with Fire from Heaven, but The Persian Boy can be read on its own.
Perfect for: Readers who want Alexander’s conquest seen from the Persian side.
10. The Gardens of Light by Amin Maalouf (1991)
Setting: Mesopotamia and the Sasanian Persian Empire, 3rd century CE
Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese-born French novelist, tells the life of Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, one of the great world religions of late antiquity. Mani was born in Mesopotamia and preached a faith that tried to unite the teachings he found around him, travelling widely and seeking the favour of the Persian kings.
Kirkus called it a fine meditative historical novel. It is quieter than most of the books on this list, a story of ideas, faith and tolerance rather than battles, and it shows a part of the ancient Middle East that almost no other novel touches. The English translation by Dorothy S. Blair appeared in 1996.
Perfect for: Readers who enjoyed Creation and want more religion and philosophy in their ancient fiction.
11. Rav Hisda’s Daughter: Apprentice by Maggie Anton (2012)
Setting: Babylonia under the Sasanian Persians, late antiquity
Hisdadukh is the youngest child of Rav Hisda, a real sage of the Babylonian Talmud. Maggie Anton built the novel from a passage in the Talmud in which the young girl sits in her father’s classroom and is asked which of his two best students she will marry. From there, Hisdadukh sets out to become an enchantress in the land where the word magic was born.
The novel shows Jewish life in Babylonia at the time the rabbis were creating the Talmud, under the rule of the Sasanian Persians, with its scholars, demons, amulets and the women of a learned household. It was a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for fiction.
Perfect for: Readers who want women’s lives in the ancient world and a setting few novels explore.
Beyond the Ancient World: Safavid Persia
These two novels by Anita Amirrezvani are set more than a thousand years after the rest of this list, in Persia under the Safavid shahs. They are not ancient, but readers who come here for Persia ask for them, so here they are.
The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani (2007)
Setting: A village and the city of Isfahan, 1620s
The unnamed narrator grows up in a remote village, the daughter of a rug maker. After her father’s sudden death, she and her mother move to Isfahan to live with relatives, and her uncle, a skilled carpet maker, teaches her his craft. In a city of beauty and danger, she has to find her own way, through friendship, betrayal and a talent few expect from a woman. The novel was longlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize for Fiction, now the Women’s Prize.
Equal of the Sun by Anita Amirrezvani (2012)
Setting: The Safavid court, 1576
When Tahmasb Shah dies in 1576 without naming an heir, the court is thrown into a dangerous succession struggle. The narrator, Javaher, is a eunuch who serves Pari Khan Khanoom, the shah’s brilliant and ambitious daughter, and who has his own reasons to look into the court’s secrets. Pari Khan Khanoom was a real princess, and the novel roughly follows her life.
Not a Novel, But Where It All Begins
The Epic of Gilgamesh (Andrew George translation)
The Epic of Gilgamesh is not historical fiction. It is the oldest great story we have, written in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago, and the source behind Silverberg’s novel above. Andrew George’s Penguin Classics translation is clear and readable, and it is the best companion to any novel set in ancient Mesopotamia.
Honourable Mention: Historical Fantasy
Pale Queen’s Courtyard by Marcin Wrona (2011)
Marcin Wrona’s first novel opens the Moonlit Cities trilogy, historical fantasy inspired by Mesopotamia under Persian rule and by the old sword and sorcery tales. A soldier who has lost his way, a thief and sorcerer who has forgotten his past, and an exiled priest’s daughter cross paths in the conquered city of Ekka. The gods and magic are real here, so it is fantasy rather than straight history, but the setting will appeal to anyone who enjoyed this list. The trilogy continues with Golden Feathers Falling and When on High.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there much historical fiction set in ancient Mesopotamia?
Not nearly as much as the period deserves. Sumer, Babylon and Assyria get a small fraction of the fiction that Rome and Greece receive, which makes the good novels set there all the more valuable. Dawn of Empire, Gilgamesh the King, Babylonia and The Assyrian are the best places to start.
What is the best novel about the Persian Empire?
For ambition and ideas, Gore Vidal’s Creation, narrated by a Persian ambassador at the court of Darius and Xerxes. For the rise of Darius the Great, Blood of Kings by Andrew James. For the empire’s fall to Alexander, seen from inside Persia, Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy.
Is Babylonia by Costanza Casati historically accurate?
Babylonia is a retelling of a legend rather than a strict reconstruction. Semiramis is a semi-legendary queen, probably based on the real Assyrian queen Sammuramat of the 9th century BCE, about whom very little is known. Casati builds her story from the legend and sets it in a carefully researched Assyrian world.
What is the earliest period covered by historical fiction set in the Middle East?
Sam Barone’s Dawn of Empire is set around 3000 BCE, when the first walled settlements were rising along the Tigris. Robert Silverberg’s Gilgamesh the King is set in Uruk in the age of its legendary early kings, the world of the oldest surviving story.
Are there novels about the Persian Wars told from the Persian side?
Very few. Most novels about Thermopylae and Salamis follow the Greeks, as in the books of Steven Pressfield. Gore Vidal’s Creation is the great exception: its narrator is a Persian who knew Xerxes and sees the wars from the Persian court.
Is there historical fiction about Cyrus the Great or Darius the Great?
Blood of Kings by Andrew James covers the death of Cyrus the Great and the rise of Darius to the throne. Darius and Xerxes are also major figures in Gore Vidal’s Creation. A major novel centred on Cyrus himself is still a gap waiting to be filled.
How is fiction about Persia different from novels set in ancient Greece?
The main difference is point of view. Most ancient world fiction looks at Persia from the Greek side, as the great enemy. Novels such as Creation and The Persian Boy turn that around and treat Persian culture as the norm, so the Greeks become the outsiders.
What should I read after this list?
For the classical world next door, see our ancient Rome historical fiction list and our upcoming Best Ancient Greece list. For ancient Egypt, try Wilbur Smith’s Egyptian series. Our Ancient World hub brings all of these together.
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