The 1850 discovery of King Ashurbanipal's vast library of cuneiform tablets at Nineveh illuminated fascinating records and complex links with neighbors.

But these tablets weren’t strictly business—they also contained literature that lives on today, including the The Epic of ...

Modest in scale yet monumental in meaning, the Cyrus Cylinder-a small baked clay artifact from the sixth century BCE-is widely regarded as one of the most important objects in world history. Buried as ...

In a study published in the journal Iraq, Dr. Troels Arbøll analyzed medical prescriptions from ancient Mesopotamia to ...

February’s night skies hold a certain celestial splendor that only enthusiastic and vigorous skywatchers have the fortitude and good fortune to enjoy.

In this two-part article, the author presents an overview of what various ancient textual artifacts “remember” about the earliest loan closings ...

In some respects, the life of a Mesopotamian scholar in the seventh century B.C. was not so very different from that of a modern academic. While the former might be responsible for reporting on ...

Gender-ambiguous people in ancient Mesopotamia were powerful and important members of society more than four millennia ago.

Recorded in cave drawings as far back as 1000BC, this is one of the oldest zodiacal constellations to be recognised in its modern form Taurus, the bull, is our focus this week. One of the oldest ...

On Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed, by Eric H. Cline.

New analysis of ancient Mesopotamian medical prescriptions suggests that, in a small but striking set of cases, patients were instructed to seek out the sanctuary of a deity as part of their healing ...

Excavations at the ancient Anatolian city of Kanesh in Turkey have revealed a district where merchants from the distant Mesopotamian city of Assur in Iraq lived and worked. Some 23,000 cuneiform ...