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An ancient trilingual inscription has surfaced on a hillside near the tomb of Persian king Darius the Great (Darius I) in Naqsh-e Rustam, the necropolis (“city of the dead”) 4 miles northwest of Persepolis, Iran. Written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, the inscription records the title of an official who was close to the royal court. Unfortunately, his name has not been preserved. Not only does this inscription shed light on the elite families who associated with the Persian kings, some of them even serving as advisors, but it also adds a new verb to all three languages—the act...

...the pillar sat in British Museum for 150 years until Irving Finkel, a curator in the Middle East department, deciphered the Sumerian cuneiform writing on the cylinder this year. As it turns out, the object, now on view in an exhibit called "No Man's Land," was erected to establish a border between the warring city states of Lagash and Umma, located in present-day southern Iraq. According to the museum, the two cities were disputing over a fertile area called Gu'edina or the 'Edge of the Plain.' Around 2400 B.C. Enmetena, king of Lagash, had the pillar erected to stake his...

Elizabeth Armstrong Moore September 27, 2016 In 1950, a collection of 29 tablets was discovered in the ruins of Ugarit, an ancient city in the northern region of present-day Syria, but only one had survived the intervening centuries well enough to be deciphered. Known as H6, the 3,500-year-old clay tablet revealed a simple hymn specifying the use of nine lyre strings and the intervals between them, much like an "ancient guitar tab," reports ClassicFM, which has recently picked up the story. The resulting melody, it says, isn't just the oldest discovered in the world, but "utterly enchanting." Musician and composer...

Archeologists at Adana's Sirkeli Mound have uncovered a double-skin wall dating back to the Iron Age. Located in the city's Ceyhan district, the wall bears the traces of a war... The defensive wall and waterways were discovered at the lower city part of the mound... they have also discovered stores and seeds on the upper part of the mound. They date back to the Iron and Early Bronze Ages... Novak said they found the wall after geophysical and surface researches that were conducted in the lower city of the mound. Excavation works have started in the light of that data....

Not all scholars agree that the artifacts should be returned right away. "If these tablets are returned and if they are from Irisagrig, it will be a great tragedy for scholarship that they will not be published before they are returned," said David Owen, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. Owen has published a number of scientific papers describing tablets from Irisagrig, but has not worked with Hobby Lobby and has not studied the seized texts. "Once they enter the bowels of the Iraq Museum, it is unlikely scholars will ever have acccess to them, nor are...

University of Tübingen archaeologists headed by Professor Peter Pfälzner have made sensational finds in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. The researchers from the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies found a cuneiform archive of 93 clay tablets dating from... the Middle Assyrian Empire. The tablets were found at the Bronze Age city site of Bassetki, which was only discovered in 2013... The researchers unearthed a layer from the little-known Mittani Kingdom (approx. 1550 - 1300) for the first time at this location. Two Mittani cuneiform tablets found in this level document intense trade conducted by the city's inhabitants around...

Archaeologist Mary Shepperson, who previously dug with the Amarna Project, reported in The Guardian this week on the discovery of "the simple desert graves of the ordinary Egyptians who lived and worked in Akhenaten's city and never got to leave." "They paint a picture of poverty, hard work, poor diet, ill-health, frequent injury and relatively early death," ... "As we started to get the first skeletons out of the ground it was immediately clear that the burials were even simpler than at the South Tombs Cemetery, with almost no grave goods provided for the dead and only rough matting used...

In 1943 and 1944, thousands of Polish soldiers were stationed in the Middle East to prepare for a possible Nazi invasion. Many soldiers collected artifacts during this period, mostly coins but also clay lamps, figurines, glass vessels and even clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions. Some of these finds were excavated by the soldiers themselves. Evidence of this can be seen in the Polish Cave at Tel Maresha, in Beit Guvrin National Park in central Israel, where a soldier evidently carved the Polish army emblem on a wall. Other parts of the collection were purchased at antiquities markets as souvenirs from...

Baked clay tablets from ancient Assyria, dating back as much as 4,000 years, could reveal the locations of 11 'lost cities' in modern-day Turkey. Harvard researchers analysed tablets found in the ancient city of Kanesh, the 12,000 cuneiform trade records include business transactions, accounts, seals and contracts. The researchers used mathematical models based on the price of goods and how frequently goods travelled between trade hubs to track down the locations of the ancient cities. Researchers reconstructed an economic network of trade goods such as wool, wine and precious metals across the Anatolian plateau in the 19th Century BC. The...

One of America’s most famously Christian businesses is amassing a vast collection of Biblical antiquities. The problem is some of them may have been looted from the Middle East. In 2011, a shipment of somewhere between 200 to 300 small clay tablets on their way to Oklahoma City from Israel was seized by U.S. Customs agents in Memphis. The tablets were inscribed in cuneiform—the script of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, present-day Iraq—and were thousands of years old. Their destination was the compound of the Hobby Lobby corporation, which became famous last year for winning a landmark Supreme Court case on...

George and I have had several meaningful conversations via email. This one might be of interest to other readers and George gave me permission to reproduce the conversation. George: I want to thank you for your blogs. I read them all the time and they have been a BIG help! I've been trying to sell others on the fact that the Hebrew lettering system goes back further than the 4th century millennium BC thanks to your findings of the Ainu/Annu culture and their lettering system in their later homeland of Japan - but with no success. I definitely believe your...

Large ancient-DNA study uncovers population that moved westwards 4,500 years ago. A mysterious group of humans from the east stormed western Europe 4,500 years ago -- bringing with them technologies such as the wheel, as well as a language that is the forebear of many modern tongues, suggests one of the largest studies of ancient DNA yet conducted. Vestiges of these eastern emigres exist in the genomes of nearly all contemporary Europeans, according to the authors, who analysed genome data from nearly 100 ancient Europeans. ...last year, a study of the genomes of ancient and contemporary Europeans found echoes not...

Since this disk was found in Crete, and the people of Crete today speak Greek, that's a good language to assume was spoken by the maker of the disk. Still, that's a guess, or a hypothesis, not a fact. Besides that, we know that not everybody on Crete spoke Greek in the Bronze Age. The classical Greeks mentioned people they called Eteocretans who did not speak Greek. Further, we know that Linear A, written by the Minoans on Crete before the Mycenean Greeks came, did not represent Greek. Professor Hubert LaMarle considers it to be an early Indo-Iranian language, related...

Inscribed on the small, pillow-shaped tablet is a 3,000-year-old warning to Idanda, king of Qatna, from the Hittite general Hanutti, telling him to prepare for war. A small Bronze Age Syrian city-state, Qatna was once under Hittite control, but had been conquered by the Mitanni people from the north. The clay tablet, like others found with it, was fired twice--once just after it was written, to preserve it, and again when the ancient city was sacked and burned to the ground in 1340 B.C. by the Hittites, who ruled an empire that stretched from northern Turkey to Mesopotamia and Syria......

Unearthed: the humble origins of world diplomacy By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent 19 January 2003 Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago. Under the ruins of a 3,800-year-old royal palace in western Syria they have found part of an ancient diplomatic and administrative library, the most important archaeological discovery of its kind for more than 20 years. Accounts on clay tablets describe the region's conquest by one of the Bronze Age's superpowers, the Hittite Empire, in 1340BC. This helped to...

Amid excavations at four different ancient sites in the Central Anatolian province of Yozgat, a cuneiform tablet has been unearthed in the Uflakle Mound at the Büyük Tafllek village. Thought to date back to around 2,000 B.C., the cuneiform tablet in the Sorgun district of Yozgat shows symbols of ishtar, known as the Hittite goddess of love, war, fertility and sexuality, more clearly than those on any other unearthed tablets. "Considering the intensity of archaeological materials on the surface and diffusion area, the mound tends to bear traces of Hittite Civilization. it is thought that the mound was affiliated to...

As the world’s foremost collector of rare biblical artifacts, Steven Green may have made a deal with the devil - helping to preserve Iraq’s disappearing Christian heritage by allegedly buying black market items plundered by the Islamic State. Green, whose family-owned Hobby Lobby company clashed bitterly with the Obama administration over federal health care laws that required it to cover reproductive services, is being investigated by Customs & Border Protection reportedly for attempting to smuggle as many as 300 age-old cuneiform tablets from Iraq into the U.S. via Israel, labeling them "tiles." It was not clear if the probe centers...

A flake of limestone (ostracon) inscribed with an ancient Egyptian word list of the fifteenth century BC turns out to be the world's oldest known abecedary. The words have been arranged according to their initial sounds, and the order followed here is one that is still known today. This discovery by Ben Haring (Leiden University) with funding from Free Competition Humanities has been published in the October issue of the 'Journal of Near Eastern Studies'. The order is not the ABC of modern western alphabets, but Halaham (HLHM), the order known from the Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Arabian and Classical Ethiopian...

An archaeological team excavating the ancient site of Alacahöyük, one of the most significant centers of the ancient Hittite civilization, cooked pastries belonging to Hittite cuisine that dates back 4,000 years. The foods found on Hittite tablets were cooked without modern technology or equipment. The 4,000-year-old Hittite cuisine was cooked in Alacahöyük, an important Neolithic settlement and Turkey's first nationally excavated area. Aykut Çınaroğlu, the head of the excavations and professor of archaeology at Ankara University, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that Chef Ömür Akkor, an excavation team member, prepared a special Hittite menu in light of the available archaeological findings....

A clay tablet that has baffled scientists for 150 years has been identified as a witness's account of the asteroid suspected of being behind the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Researchers who cracked the cuneiform symbols on the Planisphere tablet believe that recorded an asteroid thought to have been more than half a mile across. The tablet, found by Henry Layard in the remains of the library in the royal place at Nineveh in the mid-19th century, is thought to be a 700 B.C. copy of notes made by a Sumerian astronomer watching the night sky. He referred to the...