Over 5,000 years ago, in the scorching heart of ancient Mesopotamia, the city of Uruk rose to become the largest and most advanced settlement in the world. Home to nearly 80,000 people, it boasted ...

The story of how the first cities rose from southern Mesopotamia has long fascinated scientists and historians. Many explanations point to fertile soil, farming, and trade networks as the engines of ...

In southern Iraq, archaeologists have excavated a remarkable collection of carved clay tablets—ancient records of Akkadia, the world’s oldest empire. Marked with the administrative details of ...

On the bitter plains of modern Iraq there remain large piles of baked bricks covered with much sand. They have sat there in silent witness to a lost religion for 4,000 years. Only in the 19th century ...

The Great Ziggurat of Ur dedicated to the Moon god. Ziggurats were massive structure typical for Mesopotamia. Sumerians believed that the gods lived in the temple at the top of the ziggurats. Woods ...

The Sumerian takeoff -- Factors hindering our understanding of the Sumerian takeoff -- Modeling the dynamics of urban growth -- Early Mesopotamian urbanism : why? -- Early Mesopotamian urbanism : how?

Inscriptions on a set of four clay tablets from the ancient Near Eastern civilization of Babylonia have finally been completely deciphered, thousands of years after they were produced, a study reports ...

Serdar Yalçin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

But these tablets weren’t strictly business—they also contained literature that lives on today, including the The Epic of ...