The finds, which also include dozens of clay sealings, contain details of a metric system used to measure resources, as well as evidence of a cult of personality around a particularly charismatic rule ...

The oldest reference in the first known writing — cuneiform — was not about gods or kings, but about beer. Lots of it. It was ...

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 ...

Narrator: Hello, future people of the UK. Would you like to visit me at the dawn of civilisation in ancient Sumer? Well, to do that, you’ve got to travel back in time. Back before the Vikings ...

This is a Sumerian cuneiform clay tablet from the Ur III period, c.2100 B.C. This was the heyday of the Sumerian civilisation which occupied much of modern day Iraq. Sumerian was a non-Semitic ...

A symposium on Sumerian civilization and literature was recently held at Peking University, bringing together scholars and ...

A team of archaeologists in Iraq, led by Sebastian Rey, the British Museum’s curator of ancient Mesopotamia, has uncovered compelling evidence of the empire’s formidable bureaucracy.