The treasures of ancient cultures are a source of never ending inspiration. It is such a wonder to see the magnificence of the art that was created in the dawn of civilization, so long before our...
The fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur at end of the third millennium echoed over the land of Sumer, between the Tigris and Euphrates in ancient southern Mesopotamia and it opened the landscape for the...
What happens when a popular Youtuber takes on the British Museum curator at one of history’s oldest board games? That’s just what happened when Tom Scott challenged Irving Finkel to a Royal Game of...
It is unknown which culture was the first to create music, but a set of beautiful Sumerian instruments from the city of Ur provide us with some insight into the world of ancient music. Over 4,000...
A Sumerian ziggurat was a towering, stepped structures built in ancient Mesopotamia over 4,000 years ago. They were constructed by the Sumerians , who were one of the earliest civilizations in human...
A 4,000-year-old urban settlement has been discovered on the road to Ur in modern Iraq. Researchers suspect the discovery represents a lost Mesopotamian city capital that was founded on the ashes of...
“Prophecy is an emanation sent forth by the Divine Being through the medium of the Active Intellect, in the first instance to man's rational faculty, and then to his imaginative faculty.” -...
In the city of Ur, where the first settlements in the marshes of southern Mesopotamia were built with reeds without any type of nails or woods, Ningal was born to Ninhursag and Enki. Her name means...
The ancient Sumerian poet Enheduanna has a unique claim to fame: she was the first author in the world known by name. While there were previous instances of poems and stories written down, Enheduanna...
“It belongs in a museum.” With these words, Indiana Jones , the world’s best-known fictional archaeologist , articulated an association between archaeologists, antiquities , and museums that has a...
Spectacular things were happening in Mesopotamia in the period we call the Early Bronze Age, particularly in the southern part of it, commonly called Babylonia. It was here that the wealthy,...
In the early second millennium BC, the city-states of Mesopotamia thrived in the so-called “Ur III period.” Assuming political frameworks previously abandoned in times of chaos, the rulers of the...
By Karim Sadr / The Conversation There are lost cities all over the world. Some, like the remains of Mayan cities hidden beneath a thick canopy of rainforest in Mesoamerica, are found with the help...
One of the most unusual pieces of Roman pottery around is a regular looking jar but for the feature of having many holes in its body. Since it’s restoration from a pile of broken pieces found in a...
The Royal Game of Ur (known also as the Game of Twenty Squares) is a board game from ancient Mesopotamia. This two-player game is one of the oldest known board games and was immensely popular in the...
With their massive terraces decreasing in size as the building rises, ziggurats can easily be called manmade mountains. They are identifiable structures most often associated with ancient...
Known today also as Qal’at Sherqat, the ancient Assyrian city of Assur is located in the Saladin Governorate of modern day Iraq, about 280 km (174 miles) north of the capital, Baghdad. This city was...
During Sir Charles Leonard Woolley’s excavation of Ur from 1922 to 1934, any burial without a tomb chamber was given the name ‘death pit’ (known also as ‘grave pits’). Arguably the most impressive...
The Royal Cemetery of Ur received its name because of the large quantity of treasures that were discovered there during the excavations headed by Sir Charles Leonard Woolley between 1922 and 1934...
Eannatum’s tour of Elam, Urua, and Umma paid off. He controlled provinces and regions rich with resources. He had metal to produce weapons and fertile fields to grow food—both of which were used to...
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...
The war helmet of Meskalamdug is an artifact that was discovered in one of the graves in the Royal Cemetery at Ur. This grave was found to have belonged to an ensi (roughly translated as ‘ruler’) of...
The city of Ur was one of the most important Sumerian city states in ancient Mesopotamia during the 3 rd millennium BC. One of best preserved and most spectacular remains of this ancient city is the...