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

Modern historiography has tended to assume that violence was the primary driving force behind the formation of the first ...

Joshua Hammer’s “The Mesopotamian Riddle” chronicles the 19th-century contest between an archaeologist, a soldier and a clergyman to decipher an ancient text ...

Here's what that means: Local law enforcement now can identify and apprehend immigrants who entered the country illegally. The new agreement is part of the state’s efforts to support President ...

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.

Elam, like Sumeria, is an exochoronym, never used in the region itself. As the first documented polity in what we now call Iran, it remains a lesser-known contemporary of the great Mesopotamian states ...

Researchers have uncovered a vast and well-preserved network of ancient irrigation canals in the Eridu region of southern Mesopotamia, shedding new light on early farming practices. The research team, ...

Illustration of Mesopotamian urban center ... with the state and its laws and religion consolidating the new managerial hierarchies. I met Buccellati in 1994 at the first of what would become ...

By automating much of the transcription process, ProtoSnap could vastly expand the body of available ancient texts, providing new insights into Mesopotamian law, economy, and daily life.

Ziggurat of Ur. Credit: flickr / Joshua McFall CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Archaeologists have uncovered an extensive irrigation system, including canals and farms, near Sumerian Eridu, an ancient Mesopotamian ...