REVIEW BY TIMOTHY MATNEY The academic world inhabited by Sumerologists and Assyriologists is highly specialised and largely inaccessible for even the hardiest lovers of history. The texts themselves are fragmentary, often pieced together from disparate copies, deliberately anachronistic, and range…
Your observations, your objections, and your opinions: send them to cwaletters@world-archaeology.com
A reproduction of a type of Bronze Age vessel known as a ‘Magan Boat’ has just completed its maiden voyage off the coast of Abu Dhabi. The ‘Magan Boat’ is named after an ancient region in present-day Oman and the…
REVIEW BY JONATHAN VALK Assyria stands out in history as the fountainhead of empire. It was perhaps the first state to subdue the bulk of its world, extending in every direction until its frontiers consisted almost entirely of sand, sea,…
Ancient bricks inscribed with the names of Mesopotamian kings are offering an important opportunity to identify variations in the Earth’s magnetic field thousands of years ago.
REVIEW BY ECKART FRAHM Mesopotamian history, Amanda Podany argues in the introduction to her new book, ‘is more of a weathered mosaic than a grand narrative’. What she provides in her long but never boring account, which covers events and…
It seems that every few months ‘Science Notes’ is covering another breaking story on advances in a DNA research, a testament to how quickly the field is evolving. After our reporting of the successful, non-invasive extraction of human DNA from…
Known today as Tello, Girsu is one of the oldest cities in the world.
The recently discovered tavern, dating to c.2,700 BC, consisted of an open-air public eating area and a kitchen
Analysis of Beveled Rim Bowls excavated from a Late Chalcolithic site in Iraq has challenged traditional interpretations that they were used for distributing cereal rations to state-dependent labourers.
Across 8 Ancient Mesopotamian temple similar to a pyramid (8) 9 Legendary island where King Arthur was taken after his final battle (6) 10 Ancient Egyptian funerary god, one of the Four Sons of Horus (6) 11 Australian state, location…
Today, we live in a world of too much information: one in which a staggering 231,400,000 emails are sent out on average every single minute, according to the consumer data company Statista, along with countless million more text messages and…
Enheduanna, high priestess at the ancient city of Ur, is thought to be the world’s first named author. She was a poetic innovator, but she was not alone in Mesopotamian history as a prominent or a literate woman, as Lucia Marchini learns from Sidney Babcock.
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Remains of a palace at the site emerged from the waters in 2010, and in 2018, when water levels were again low, archaeologists carried out a short campaign, documenting the palace.
Between which five present-day countries is the roughly defined geo-cultural territory of Kurdistan mostly now divided?
Important as commercial commodities and as symbols of wealth and power, the animals also appear to be associated with the pre-Islamic Arabian goddess, Allat.
Ancient Mesopotamian literature, written in cuneiform from around 3000 BC, is haunted by omens and ghosts. Most of the sources on ghosts come from the 1st millennium BC, written in Akkadian, but some texts and ideas hark back to even…
The history of the Mesopotamian city of Babylon had a powerful legacy even within antiquity. Today, many are familiar with the city, situated in modern Iraq, for its numerous appearances in the Bible and for the fabled wonder of the…
The first excavations began in April 2021, and were focused entirely upon Tell al-Duhalia, which is home to hundreds of archaeologically significant sites, such as the Great Ziggurat of Ur.
Archaeologists have stated that a monument at the Banat-Bazi complex is over 4,000 years old.
The Rosetta Stone was the key to unlocking the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs. The results of Jean-François Champollion’s work on the Stone’s inscription may be well known, but other scholars – with different attitudes towards ancient Egypt – also took up the challenge. Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz examine what forgotten manuscripts can tell us about the decipherment of the ancient scripts. examines what forgotten manuscripts can tell us about the decipherment of the ancient scripts.
This intelligent, articulate, and visually imaginative three-part BBC documentary series about five millennia of writing – shortened into two parts for US transmission as A to Z in the PBS series NOVA – is particularly welcome, and will probably be watched for many years.
The carving depicts a clean-shaven, elite male figure, perhaps a high-priest or ruler, sitting on a decorated stool, wearing a kaunakes (a type of Sumerian long skirt).
It was a splendid tour: we stayed in 9 different hotels over 16 days, which meant that we were always on the move. But this was just what we wanted, for we explored the heart of the historic country and saw – if briefly – most of the best-known archaeological sites.