Giorgio Buccellati’s At the Origins of Politics takes readers to the early stages of a process that became the structure of ...

The Mesopotamian State Solved the Debt Problem ... What enabled and made this sustained achievement so successful were royal laws to regularly restore economic balance on a system-wide level.

Many other respected sets of laws have been highly impractical in quite puzzling ways, including those developed by the authors of the Old Testament. Although inspired by the Mesopotamian tradition, ...

For centuries, the study of cuneiform—the world’s oldest known writing system—relied on painstaking manual transcription, ...