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Ancient Origins Tour IRAQ

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Leaving an Impression: Revealing the Intricate Story of Sumerian Cylinder Seals

Leaving an Impression: Revealing the Intricate Story of Sumerian Cylinder Seals

A cylinder seal is a small cylindrical object with images, words, or both, engraved onto it. Sumerian cylinder seals would be rolled over wet clay to make an impression. When the clay dried, a seal...
Trading in the Bronze Age: Living the High Life in the Great City of Ugarit

Trading in the Bronze Age: Living the High Life in the Great City of Ugarit

Ugarit is an ancient city located on the coast of Syria. The ruins of this site are in the form of a tell (or mound) known as Ras Shamra, and are situated 10 km (6.2 miles) to the north of Latakia,...
Instructions of Shuruppak: 4,600 Years Ago, A Sumerian King Instructed His Son on How to Behave

Instructions of Shuruppak: 4,600 Years Ago, A Sumerian King Instructed His Son on How to Behave

The Instructions of Shuruppak are a set of 4,600-year-old Sumerian proverbs given by a king to his son, which essentially set out how he should behave. The ancient inscriptions were engraved in...
The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld: A 5,500-Year-Old Literary Masterpiece

The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld: A 5,500-Year-Old Literary Masterpiece

The Descent of Inanna (known also as ‘Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld / Underworld’) is a piece of work in the literary corpus of ancient Mesopotamia. This story, which was originally written in...
A Sumerian king and an official

Where Sumerian Rulers Lie: The Royal Tombs of Ur

The Royal Tombs of Ur is a 4,800-year-old Sumerian burial site of around 2,000 graves located in the ancient city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia (in the south of modern day Iraq). Sixteen of the...
This is the oldest known pay stub in the world, dating back 5,000 years to the city of Uruk in Mesopotamia. The wages were beer.

5,000-Year-Old Mesopotamian Pay Stub Reveals Workers Were Paid with Beer

An ancient cuneiform tablet dating back to 3,000 BC, which was discovered in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, in modern day Iraq, reveals that the workers of the ancient city were paid with beer...
Intellectual, Code Breaker, Blasphemer: George Smith and the Ancient Chaldean Account of Genesis

Intellectual, Code Breaker, Blasphemer: George Smith and the Ancient Chaldean Account of Genesis

George Smith was born in 1840 in London to poor parents, and consequently left school at the tender age of fifteen to take up an apprenticeship with Messrs Bradburry and Evans, a firm of engravers...
The Loa Giants: Impressive and Enigmatic Geoglyphs in Northern Chile

The Loa Giants: Impressive and Enigmatic Geoglyphs in Northern Chile

Alberto Nadgar Rojas, researcher, visual artist, and photographer, defends the existence in northern Chile of an ancient civilization of giants as a hypothesis to explain what may be the biggest...
The Clay Tablet that reveals the Babylonians were using calculus to track the path of Jupiter.

Clay Tablet Reveals Ancient Babylonians Used Calculus to Track Jupiter 1,500 Years before Europeans

A new analysis of a set of ancient clay tablets has revealed that ancient astronomers of Babylonia used advanced geometrical methods to calculate the position of Jupiter – a conceptual leap that was...
A collection of tablets displaying Indus Valley script.

Decoding the mysterious ancient Indus Valley script will shed light on powerful ancient civilization

Linguists have cracked many tough scripts, from Mesopotamian cuneiform to Egyptian hieroglyphic to Central American Mayan glyphs, but there are a few ancient, mysterious scripts still in the field...
This clay tablet in inscribed with one part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was most likely stolen from a historical site before it was sold to a museum in Iraq

Previously Unknown Lines to the Epic of Gilgamesh discovered in Stolen Cuneiform Tablet

An Assyriologist at the University of London (UCL) has discovered that a stolen clay tablet inscribed with ancient cuneiform text that was recently acquired by a museum in Iraq, contains 20...
Fuenta Magna

Fuente Magna, the Controversial Rosetta Stone of the Americas

By April Holloway | The Epoch Times The Fuenta Magna is a large stone vessel, resembling a libation bowl, that was found in 1958 near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. It features beautifully engraved...
7th century BC inscription in Georgia

7th century BC inscription in Georgia may rewrite history of written language

Archaeologists working at the ancient site of Grakliani Hill in Georgia have found inscriptions that may date back 2,700 years—well before the alphabet was known to have been in use in the Caucasus...
Bahrain Fort

Ancient Persian Cuneiform Contract and Artifacts Discovered in Bahrain Fort

A private contract written in Akkadian script on a clay tablet has been discovered among other artifacts in a fort in Bahrain. The discovery, reported in Trade Arabia , was found among a number of...
4,000-Year-Old Ancient Babylonian Tablet

4,000-Year-Old Ancient Babylonian Tablet is Oldest Customer Service Complaint Ever Discovered

A clay tablet from ancient Babylon reveals that no matter where (or when) you go, good customer service can be hard find. So it was revealed by the irate copper merchant, Nanni, in 1750 B.C. The...
Relief, circa 728 B.C., depicting an Assyrian warrior holding a large shield to protect two archers taking aim, from the Central Palace in Nimrud and now in the British Museum, London.

Weapons and tactics change, but PTSD goes back millennia

The weapons, tactics and strategies of warfare have changed enormously through the centuries, but the hellish aspects of war and the deep psychological scars it leaves on warriors were apparently...
The Cyrus Cylinder and the ancient proclamation of human rights

The Cyrus Cylinder and the ancient proclamation of human rights

More than 2 millennia before the French Revolution introduced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizens , an ancient Near Eastern monarch issued a charter that is considered to be the...
Babylonian Map of the World

The Babylonian map of the world sheds light on ancient perspectives

A damaged clay tablet discovered in the late 1800s in Sippar, Iraq is said to be the oldest map of the world. It was discovered on the banks of the Euphrates River, and published in 1899. Now housed...
Gilgamesh Cylinder Seal

The Legend of Gilgamesh

Myths are traditional stories that address the various ways of living and being. The well-known myth of Gilgamesh has been cited in many sources as one of the first stories in our recorded human...
Prehistoric bookkeeping tokens

Prehistoric bookkeeping continued long after invention of writing

An ancient token-based recording system from before the dawn of history was rendered obsolete by the birth of writing, according to popular wisdom. But now, latest excavations show that, in fact,...
Assyrian Stele - Ancient Curse

Assyrian stele containing ancient curse will not be reunited with its other half

Whoever discards this image from the presence of Salmanu puts it into another place, whether he throws it into water or covers it with earth or brings and places it into a taboo house where it is...
A text describing omens based on eclipses, Assyria

Omens in the Ancient World

In the ancient world, omens, especially bad omens, were not to be taken lightly. In ancient civilisations, the world was thought to be inhabited by supernatural forces. These forces were capable of...
Ancient Mesopotamia Amulet

Ancient Mesopotamian Amulet found in Oman

An ancient amulet inscribed with cuneiform writing and dating back to the Mesopotamian civilization has been found during excavations in Dibbia, Musandam in Oman. It has been reported in the times of...
Ancient Structur e in Turkey

Massive 4,500 year-old structure uncovered in Turkey

Archaeologists have found a huge structure at a dig site known as the Kultepe mound in Turkey which dates back four-and-a-half thousand years. It is believed that the building belonged to an...

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