This low-relief limestone carving, dating to c.2400 BC, formed part of a larger votive wall plaque in a Sumerian temple in southern…
What is it? This ancient Mesopotamian sculpture known as the ‘ram in the thicket’ is actually a ‘goat in a tree’. The…
Before September, the people in this picture had never picked up a chisel. Now, only a few months into World Monument Fund’s…
Prof Roger Matthews, Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Reading The study of the ancient Near East is inextricably linked with political developments…
Off the beaten track in Iraqi Kurdistan For millennia, empires have clashed in the breathtaking landscape of Mesopotamia, leaving in their wake…
The dig The site of Babylon – one of the oldest, richest, and most fabled cities of Antiquity – had attracted a…
The World’s Longest Living Town Today, you will only get a view of Erbil Citadel ‘some four miles away’ from the window…
On an overland ride from England to Ceylon in 1839, Austen Henry Layard became fascinated by the newly emerging archaeology of Mesopotomia…
From the underground chambers of the Royal Tombs emerged a picture of a civilisation that was at once dazzling and sinister…
This autumn the Penn Museum will hold an exhibition on their first-ever excavation at Nippur in modern Iraq. But it all centres…
The Rape of Mesopotamia is not an exaggerated title, unfortunately. His book is an ‘autopsy of a cultural disaster’, writes Lawrence Rothfield,…
Five years on from the US occupation of Iraq, archaeologists have been attempting to quantify the scale of the damage to heritage…