Chogha Zanbil was first spotted from a surveillance airplane in 1935. The excavated complex was discovered to be one of the few ziggurats built outside Mesopotamia. The ruins of the ancient Elamite ...

Around 2112 B.C., the Sumerian king Ur-Namma (r. 2112–2095 B.C.) united the city-states of southern Mesopotamia into a short-lived kingdom known today as the Third Dynasty of Ur, or Ur III. More than ...

On May 2, 2003, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, London’s Metropolitan Police raided an antiquities dealer and seized eight artifacts they believed had been obtained through illicit channels. It’s ...

Can you chip in? As an independent nonprofit, the Internet Archive is fighting for universal access to quality information. We build and maintain all our own systems, but we don’t charge for access, ...

Can you chip in? This year we’ve reached an extraordinary milestone: 1 trillion web pages preserved on the Wayback Machine. This makes us the largest public repository of internet history ever ...

Lamassu are human-headed, eagle-winged, bulls or lions that once protected cities in Mesopotamia. They were believed to be very powerful creatures, and served both as a clear reminder of the king’s ...