Archaeologists have made a remarkable discovery in Turkey, unearthing a 3,500-year-old cuneiform tablet that provides a detailed account of a significant purchase. This ancient artifact was found ...

While excavating the 19/3 site in Iraq’s Al-Fayadiya district, a team led by archaeologist Quhtan Abbas Hassan Aboud has ...

One joke, etched in the ancient cuneiform writing of the Sumerian people, stands as the oldest recorded bar joke and dates back roughly 4,000 years. It reads: “A dog walks in a bar and says, ‘I cannot ...

The careful documentation of hundreds of thousands of inscriptions helped scholars to unravel the mysteries of cuneiform—the world’s oldest writing system. First developed in Sumer, an ancient ...

Anyone who is capable of seeing the moon (or the sun) near the horizon has experienced this effect. The moon looks enormous ...

How do we know what life was like in the Fertile Crescent? We know what ancient life was like, in part, because people wrote about it. The Sumerians developed cuneiform, the first known writing system ...

In a significant advancement for archaeology in Iraq, an excavation expedition in the historic province of Babylon has ...

Born in 1840 to a modest London family, George Smith not only became an expert in the cuneiform script of ancient Mesopotamia, but also made a discovery that turned contemporary notions about ...

This volume offers a practical introduction to the repertoire of personal names recorded in cuneiform texts from Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. In this period, individuals moved freely as well ...

Recent archaeological discoveries are leading to a radical revision by scholars of the intensity, scale and importance of ...