Almost 2,000 years after falling out of use, a Cambridge University linguistics specialist, Dr. Martin Worthington has learned how to speak ancient Babylonian and is not only campaigning to revive it...
Ninurta was a Mesopotamian deity associated with war, agriculture, and the scribal arts. He could be thought of as a defender of civilization against chaos. Ninurta was originally revered in southern...
This weekend, history experts across London are attempting to solve the astronomical mystery surrounding an ancient carved “meteorite” found in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) by a 19th century English...
Home to Gilgamesh, Uruk was the major force of urbanization and state formation during the 4th millennium BC. In Epic of Gilgamesh , the king is said to have built the city’s monumental walls. There...
In 1853, Hormuzad Rassam discovered fragments of an ancient Sumerian text which is now considered to be the first great work of literature our civilization ever produced. After its translation it was...
The Fertile Crescent is the name given to the arc-shaped area of land that stretched across the Middle East from the northern end of the Gulf in the East to the Nile Valley in the West. It was here...
Charles Stanish / The Conversation “ The Epic of Gilgamesh ” is one of the earliest texts known in the world. It’s the story of a god-king, Gilgamesh, who ruled the city of Uruk in Mesopotamia in the...
The 5,000-year-old bodies of a 12-year-old a boy and girl surrounded by “hundreds of bronze spearheads and eight human sacrifices” were unearthed at Basur Höyük in southeastern Turkey (Mesopotamia,)...
A musician may have strummed its strings all the way back in the 3rd millennium BC. This means that the Bull’s Lyre, aka the Golden Lyre of Ur, is one of the oldest string instruments in the world...
Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority working at Bet Ha-‘Emeq have discovered a shard from an early Bronze Age storage vessel depicting scenes from what seems to be a ‘sacred marriage...
In an exciting discovery, archaeologists have found the location of the lost royal city of Mardama. The ancient Hurrian city had laid buried for millennia until archaeologists unearthed the remains...
Medical usage? Ritual practice? Or perhaps the drugs served both purposes? Researchers are asking what the recently recovered psychoactive drug residues from ancient Mesopotamia mean. But not...
Now it’s a desert, but 4000 years ago the ancient site of Abu Tbeirah in southern Iraq was a thriving Sumerian port town. It was a hub where ships set sail for distant lands such as the Indus Valley...
Analysis of a collection of clay tablets confirms that a Mesopotamian doctor had to deal with more than just physical ailments. The ancient healer was expected to exorcise demons, ward off witchcraft...
Assyria, like Mesopotamia in general, has always excited the Western imagination. Assyrian beliefs about the spiritual world are no exception. The Assyrians believed that ghosts could return from the...
In Part I, the author pieced together the possible genealogy to be found in Mesopotamia and Egypt, taking as his starting point the Biblical account of human developments in the region after the...
It is a little-known piece of history that Saddam Hussein was a great fan of ancient Mesopotamian literature. His enthusiasm for epics written in cuneiform – the world’s oldest known form of writing...
On Monday, August 21, people living in the continental United States will be able to see a total solar eclipse. Humans have been alternatively amused, puzzled, bewildered and sometimes even terrified...
In late 2013, interesting fresh evidence dating back five and a half millennia was found, giving insights into the enigma of the Mesopotamian clay balls. Through use of CT scanning to peer into the...
Louise Pryke / The Conversation As singer Pat Benatar once noted, love is a battlefield . Such use of military words to express intimate, affectionate emotions is likely related to love’s capacity to...
Half the world seems to say the Bible is pure bunk, while the other half says it’s, well, the word of God. Now comes a professor who isn’t religious to say that a baked tablet from ancient Babylon...
Red lipstick is a modern-day symbol of sex appeal and an attribute of femininity. Many modern women may be surprised by the fact that our recent generations are not the ones which invented this...
Though the Islamic State group (Daesh) recently plundered and wrecked a few ancient Assyrian cities, fighters recently successfully defended Erbil in Iraq, known long ago as Arbela. In that city,...
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...