Mesopotamia

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• SOURCE: ScienceNews
  10/13/2022
  

  Drone Photos Give New Insight into Mesopotamian City Structure

  Evidence of separate clusters of urbanization on islands separated by marshland suggests that ancient Lagash did not grow out from one administrative and ceremonial center but was a polycentric urban zone. 

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• SOURCE: History.com
  10/9/2020
  

  How Hammurabi Transformed Babylon Into a Powerful City-State

  Hammurabi's governing strategies of building support through public works, pursuing information, and self-promotion are not unfamiliar to contemporary politics.

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• SOURCE: Euro News
  6/10/2019
  

  New dam on River Tigris threatens thousands of years of heritage in Turkey

  A new dam being built on the River Tigris is believed to responsible for potentially displacing around 50 thousand people from the area, and the historical losses are incalculable.

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  12-7-2018
  

  Recently Deciphered 4,500-Year-Old Pillar Shows First Known Record of a Border Dispute

  The marble stele, held in the British Museum’s collections for 150 years, also includes the first known use of the term “no man’s land.”

• SOURCE: Telegraph (UK)
  5-6-13
  

  Hanging gardens not in Babylon

  No trace of the Hanging Garden has ever been found in Babylon for the simple reason that this wonder of the ancient world was never there in the first place, according to an Oxford researcher.Instead, the Hanging Garden was actually created 300 miles further north in Ninevah, a feat of artistic prowess achieved by the Assyrian civilisation under King Sennacherib, writes Stephanie Daley, a Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford.For centuries, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylonia, has been credited with the birth of a lavishly watered paradise in the fertile crescent of what is now central Iraq in the 6th century BC.But there is one problem: no remains of the Hanging Garden have ever been found in Babylon. When a German team spent 19 years excavating the site during the last century, Ms Daley writes that they "expected to find inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar confirming that he built the garden"....

• SOURCE: AP
  4-4-13
  

  Ancient site unearthed in Biblical home of Abraham

  BAGHDAD –  British archaeologists said Thursday they have unearthed a sprawling complex near the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq, home of the biblical Abraham.The structure, thought to be about 4,000 years old, probably served as an administrative center for Ur, around the time Abraham would have lived there before leaving for Canaan, according to the Bible.The compound is near the site of the partially reconstructed Ziggurat, or Sumerian temple, said Stuart Campbell of Manchester University's Archaeology Department, who led the dig."This is a breathtaking find," Campbell said, because of its unusually large size -- roughly the size of a football field, or about 260 feet on each side. The archaeologist said complexes of this size and age were rare....

• SOURCE: SciNews
  2-20-13
  

  Radial routes ran outside Iraq

  Spoke-like dirt paths extend as far as five kilometers from several ancient Mesopotamian cities that have been excavated in what’s now northeastern Syria. Although often regarded as transportation features unique to these more than 5,000-year-old sites, new evidence reveals similar radial paths in western Syria and southwestern Iran that date to as recently as 1,200 years ago....