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 ...

Humans have sought out relationships since the earliest days of Homo sapiens — but getting married? That's something our ancestors didn't have in mind. Marriage as an institution is likely only ...

Wars have shaped the course of human civilization for thousands of years, but some wars last longer than a generation, evolving to decades or more than a century. Long historical wars generally ...

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 ...

There’s no sign of Ron Perlman so far, but Sumerian Six has big Hellboy energy and it’s all the better for it. Imagine Desperados III, but you’ve swapped the Wild West for World War II and you can ...

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, ...

The Sumerians were the first known people to settle in Mesopotamia over 7,000 years ago. Located in the southernmost part of Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (modern day Iraq), ...

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 ...

A clay tablet with proto-cuneiform writing. Image credits: Jim Kuhn/Wikimedia Commons. Imagine a world without written records — no books, no laws, no way to document discoveries or communicate ideas ...