[arrogantsob]

Mesopotamian civilization was totally unknown (outside the Bible) until a couple of centuries ago. It was the first since it had the first cities. We have just begun to scratch the surface of it.

Unfortunately, there was near constant war between these cities then empires which wound up weakening it so badly that the Persians under Cyrus (with the aid of the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity) destroyed it.

Civilizations have almost always been destroyed by invaders from the North. Ours may be unique.

[Red Badger]

There is a huge void in the history of man from the neolithic age up until about 10,000 years ago.

That spans about 50k or so years.

What was going on during that time?.........................

[Verginius Rufus]

They have even found a math "word problem" on a cuneiform tablet (don't remember if it was Babylonian or Assyrian...but a lot of the tablets come from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal).

We can read cuneiform because a 19th-century scholar copied the trilingual text of the Behistun inscription (King Darius' account of how he became king of the Persian Empire with the help of Ahura Mazda)...harder to crack than Egyptian hieroglyphics because none of the three texts could be read initially.

Darius was possibly the inventor of the Big Lie.