When the jealous High Priest of Enki murders the King during a holy festival and stages a takeover of the palace, the Crown Prince, Ammon-shur, must flee for his life with nothing more than the clothes on his back. His faithful bodyguard, Balashi, saves him from capture and death at the hands of his enemies, and together the two make their way to the ancient city of Uruk, home of the ancient and powerful temple of Inanna. Ammon goes to the temple to seek allies that he might recruit to his cause to unseat the High Priest of Enki and retake his throne. While at the temple he meets Iltani, the fascinating and beautiful High Priestess of Inanna. Ammon scarcely gets to know the High Priestess before discovering that she is enmeshed in her own struggles against the members of the temple council, who maintain her as a powerless figurehead. Far from finding aid for his own cause, Ammon finds himself promising to help Iltani free herself from the influence of the temple council as well as to help her investigate a darker plot...

This Box set includes the first four books of the Novels of Ancient Sumeria series: The Prince of Eridu, The Prince and the Priestess, The Prince and the Prophet and The Prince and the Kings. This is the first in a seven-part series that will sweep you into the alluring and dangerous world of the first empire in history, an exotic and yet eerily familiar place that gave birth to many of the ideas that can still be found battling for hearts and minds among the people of the world even today. The story is experienced through the eyes of Ammon-shur, a prince of the ancient and exotic city of Eridu, who barely escapes a palace coup instigated by the shadowy and ruthless organization whose vile practices were decried for millennia by ancient Hebrew prophets, Greek philosophers and Roman sages alike. This wild adventure, based on the oldest written records of both Mediterranean and Mesopotamian sources, depicts a time when the protections of cultures and kingdoms were torn away by the sweeping changes in technology, religion and climate which pushed ancient peoples into bloody conflict with one another and led directly to the dissemination of the stories of heroes and prophets which still circulate in Western thought today.

Ammon-shur thought that saving the girl and escaping deadly peril in Uruk meant that he would live a safe and happy life in his new home in Ur. With his business prospering, a new daughter just born and everything looking up he is deliriously happy, but he did not reckon with the spread of a deadly new religion that accompanied a massive expansion of the slave trade. Life and liberty become precious commodities as people across Sumeria and beyond are targeted by roving bands of slavers. While slowly worsening domestic troubles lead Ammon to spend more time running caravans to distant cities he runs afoul of slave takers and finds that getting cast into the copper mines of Magan from which few return is just the beginning of his troubles.

The empire of Akkad is coming apart at the seams and Ammon-shur and his family find themselves in the middle of all of the social and political turmoil. With the nomadic Gutian Confederation to the North sensing an opportunity to snatch up loot and slaves from the poorly defended cities on the periphery of the empire, an aggressively expansionist Elamite empire looking to settle old scores once and for all and restive Sumerian city-states inside the empire hoping to throw off Akkadian domination for good, it seems that there is no safe haven to be found anywhere. Even the unimportant backwaters of Canaan where Ammon’s daughter and son-in-law make their home has been drawn into the growing conflagration and Ammon soon finds himself thrust into battle after battle against his will as he fights to hold his family together in the face of the ever stronger winds of war which seem poised to tear it apart.

For Ammon-Shur the struggle to end the slave trade in Sumeria is not going as planned. He has barely survived several attempts on his life and the few people he has been able to save are less than a drop in the bucket compared to the many thousands who are bought and sold across Sumeria every week. When he decides to try a new approach to get people to care about slavery he finds himself in unfamiliar territory as a lifetime of mostly ignoring the gods is suddenly turned on its head by close daily contact with a prophet of the Lord of Light. As Ammon struggles to find a way to accept his newfound piety the secret cabal of the worshipers of Chaos disrupt all of Ammon's plans and he finds that facing down dangerous bands of slavers is child's play compared to the new challenges that will require all of his wit and skill to survive.