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Long before Karen, there was Nanni. (Geni/Wikimedia Commons) ****************************************************************** Almost 4,000 years ago, a Mesopotamian man named Nanni was so disappointed with the copper he bought from a trader named Ea-nāṣir, that he decided to write a formal complaint. Today, this Bronze Age clay tablet is the oldest customer complaint we know of – and it's a doozy. Writing and trade have an inseparable history. Some of the oldest surviving examples of written language are stocktakes and ledgers recorded in the ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform script. Since copper is a key ingredient in the very bronze the age was named for,...

Recent research by a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and geologists has revealed that the Eridu region of southern Mesopotamia, inhabited from the sixth to the first millennium BCE, boasts one of the oldest and most well-preserved irrigation networks.Led by geoarchaeologist Jaafar Jotheri from Durham University, the research team uncovered an extensive water management system that predates the first millennium BC, offering valuable insights into the irrigation practices of ancient farmers.The Eridu region of southern Mesopotamia, located in present-day Iraq, is one of the best-preserved ancient archaeological sites, having been occupied from the sixth until the early first millennium BC. While...

The complete game was found in a catacomb grave, but without a copy of the rules. The Royal Game of Ur, helpfully, had its rules written out on a cuneiform tablet. Image credit: Mary Harrsch/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) After thousands of years, we may finally know how to play an ancient board game, or at least a decent approximation of it. In 1977, Italian and Iranian archaeologists were excavating a cemetery in Shahr-i Sokhta in the south-eastern region of Iran when they discovered an unusual item in grave number 731. Inside the pseudo-catacomb grave was an ancient board game, coming...

A Sumerian “sacred code” has been deciphered, revealing divinely inspired building instructions echoed in the Bible. Experts have been puzzled since unearthing the 4,000-year-old statue of a leader called Gudea, which features an architectural plan, an inscription claiming he built a temple commanded to him in a dream, and a “ruler” of undeciphered measurements.... British Museum archaeologists have now cracked the “sacred code” of these mysterious measurements after finding a lost temple in Iraq...Dr Sebastien Rey, director of the British Museum’s project in Iraq, said: “It is like the precise measurement we see in the Bible in a much later...

Researchers have discovered a 5,000-year-old tavern hidden 19 inches underground in southern Iraq, according to a Jan. 23 press release from the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). Archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pisa conducted the excavation beginning in 2019, Smithsonian Magazine reported. The team used advanced technology, including drone imagery and magnetometry, to identify the site’s layout. The site, located in the ancient city of Lagash, offers clues about the lives of everyday people who lived in southern Mesopotamia around 2700 B.C.E. Inside the open-air eating space, archaeologists found benches, an oven, a clay refrigerator called...

A team of archaeologists from the Iraqi German Mission of the State Board of Antiquities and the Orient Department of the German Archaeological Institute have excavated a 4000-year-old boat near the ancient city of Uruk.Uruk, also known as Warka was an ancient city of Sumer (and later of Babylonia), situated on the dried-up ancient channel of the Euphrates River.Uruk played a leading role in the early urbanisation of Sumer in the mid-4th millennium BC, emerging as a major population centre until it was abandoned shortly before or after the Islamic conquest of AD 633–638.The boat was first discovered during a...

It is a commonly accepted view in mainstream archaeology that civilization started in ancient Mesopotamia with the great civilization of Sumer in what is now modern-day Iraq. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologists excavating at Tell Al’Ubaid in Iraq made an unusual discovery when they unearthed several 7,000-year-old artifacts which appear to represent humanoid figures with reptilian features. The domestic architecture of the Ubaidians included large T-shaped houses, open courtyards, paved streets, as well as food processing equipment. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art , some of these villages began to develop into towns, temples began...

The story of the Ark that saved humanity from the flood seems wide spread in Eurasian mythos. In truth some of what has been passed down is far fetched, but may have a basis in history such as the bursting of the Black Sea dam. Because we are living in an age of myths, Global Warming, Spotted Owls, and Obama, maybe we look at the realities behind these stories. As you might guess I think Campbell(Golden Bough?) sucks.

Skeptics claim that the flood narrative of Genesis1 is a rewritten version of an original myth, The Epic of Gilgamesh, from the Enuma Elish produced by the Sumerians. The flood of the Epic of Gilgamesh is contained on Tablet XI2 of twelve large stone tablets that date to around 650 B.C. These tablets are obviously not originals, since fragments of the flood story have been found on tablets that date to 2,000 B.C. It is likely that the story itself originated much before that, since the Sumerian cuneiform writing has been estimated to go as far back as 3,300 B.C.The...

<p>Darren Aronofsky’s Noah dominated the U.S. box office on its opening weekend and won critical acclaim, but not without controversy. The film, based on the biblical story in Genesis of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood, arrived amid a deluge of outrage from religious groups. Some Christians fumed at the film’s straying from biblical Scripture. Meanwhile, a host of Muslim-majority countries banned Noah from screening in theaters because representations of Noah, a prophet of God in the Koran, are considered blasphemous. Such images “provoke the feelings of believers and are forbidden in Islam and a clear violation of Islamic law,” read a fatwa issued by Cairo’s al-Azhar University, one of the foremost institutions of Sunni Islam. Egypt has not banned the film, but Indonesia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have. “It is important to respect these religions and not show the film,” lectured the main censors of the UAE.</p>

The remarkable find was made at Penn Museum in Philadelphia, in the basement of the building where other archaeological artefacts are displayed. The skeleton had been left in the basement for 85 years before being rediscovered and represents a rare find. While the museum has other remains from ancient Ur, about 10 miles (16 km) from Nassiriya in southern Iraq, "Noah" - as the skeleton was named - is about 2,000 years older than any remains uncovered during the excavation at the site. The museum said the discovery had important implications for current research. Scientific techniques that were not available...

At 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, Israeli police say, authorities arrested five Palestinian antiquities dealers in Jerusalem and confiscated items dating back thousands of years from their homes and shops: papyrus fragments from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the bust of an Etruscan woman, a fresco from Pompeii depicting swimming fish. They also seized more modern objects — two black luxury Audi vehicles — and more than $200,000 in cash.

The billionaire owners of craft giant Hobby Lobby are under federal investigation for allegedly looting hundreds of ancient artifacts from the Middle East for use in their personal “Museum of the Bible,” according to a report. The Green family has been under investigation since 2011, the Daily Beast reports, when Memphis customs seized nearly 300 clay tablets en route to the Hobby Lobby headquarters in Oklahoma City. …

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...

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...

An archaeologist has admitted that around 1,400 cuneiform tablets might have been stolen from Irisagrig, a 4,000-year-old lost Sumerian city in modern day Iraq. While the robbers obviously know the location of the ancient city, the authorities don’t! In a Live Science article we learn that ‘only looters have the location’ of this ancient city and perplexed archaeologists said this haul of newly examined tablets describes not only the palace of Irisagrig and the animals kept on the grounds, including lions and dogs; but that they also detail a festival held in a temple dedicated to a god of mischief....

How long have humans brewed beer? Patrick McGovern, the world's foremost historian of ancient brews, hints in Ancient Brews (2017) that this activity has been around possibly at least for 11,000 years based on vessels from Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia (Turkey). How sophisticated was brewing in antiquity? Since the ancient artifact ca. 100 CE known as the "Baghdad Battery" was discovered in the 1930's, the purpose for which it was used has been a mystery. Wilhelm Koenig, a German curator of the Baghdad Museum, discovered it near Ctesiphon - the Sassanid capital and previously in the Parthian Empire around 1936...

Hasanlu developed into a significant commercial and production center during the early Iron Age (1400-800 B.C.), owing to its location on important trade and communication routes between Mesopotamia and Anatolia. The citadel at the center of the settlement contained an array of monumental buildings, including palaces, temples, and large multi-columned halls. The evidence Danti is studying confirms that the citadel met with a violent end. Many buildings were ransacked and burned, which caused them to collapse. In addition, the remains of more than 250 people were uncovered, some with signs of systematic execution. "The horrific level of violence evident in...

...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...

A team of engineers at the University of Liverpool has helped reproduce an ancient Iraqi harp – the Lyre of Ur Engineers from the University's Lairdside Laser Engineering Centre (LLEC) employed revolutionary laser technology to engrave authentic designs onto Gulf Shell (mother of pearl) – the original material used to decorate the body of the harp. Dr Carmel Curran, who carried out the work at the LLEC, commented: "This is the first time we have laser processed this type of material and the results are remarkable. It is fantastic to be involved in the recreation of such a piece of...