On the bitter plains of modern Iraq there remain large piles of baked bricks covered with much sand. They have sat there in silent witness to a lost religion for 4,000 years. Only in the 19th century ...

An aerial view of the Sumerian temple. Archaeologists in Iraq have unearthed the remains of a 4,500-year-old Sumerian temple dedicated to Ningirsu, the Mesopotamian god of springtime thunder, the ...

Ancient scripts were a window into the linguistic practices of people, which were influenced by their cultural setting. A fragment of a Sumerian tablet was proof of this, as a team of researchers ...

Archaeologists uncovered a 5,000-year-old sacred plaza in Iraq that was used for rituals to appease a Mesopotamian warrior-god. The team working at the site in Telloh believe it was used for feasts, ...

Sumer was one of the ancient civilizations in southern Iraq, likely first settled sometime between C 5500 and 4000 BC. But now, seven thousand years later, the gods of this prehistoric people are ...

Every work dealing with the history of beer, it seems, starts out talking blithely about the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia as the first brewers, the inventors of beer, some eight to ten thousand ...

The story of how the first cities rose from southern Mesopotamia has long fascinated scientists and historians. Many explanations point to fertile soil, farming, and trade networks as the engines of ...

A new interdisciplinary study shows that the rise of the first urban civilization was not solely a product of human ingenuity, but a complex response to coastal dynamics and the predictable rhythms of ...