Sumer is one of history’s oldest civilizations. Long before the Egyptians built the pyramids, the Sumerians flourished in Mesopotamia. Between 4,500 and 1,900 B.C.E.. they invented one of the ...

The ancient Sumerians called themselves salmat qaqqadi, ... Sumerian kings regained control around the 21st century B.C., in a period historians call the Third Dynasty of Ur.

In ancient Mesopotamia (roughly modern Iraq), eclipses were in fact regarded as omens, as signs of things to come. For an eclipse to take place, three celestial bodies must find themselves in a ...

In a first, researchers have sequenced the complete genome of a man from ancient Egypt, and the results reveal that he had ...

Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a 4,500-year-old Sumerian temple at the heart of the ancient city of Girsu, in southeastern Iraq. When you purchase through links on our site, we may ...

Learn more about life in Ancient Sumer in this BBC Bitesize year 5/6 history guide. What was the Ancient Sumer civilisation? ... This Sumerian King List prism is from around 2004BC-1595BC.

A carved panel found at Nimrud depicts Assyrian soldiers swimming across a river and using inflatable goat skins as floaties.

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 ...

King Ashurbanipal was known for his “religious zeal,” patronage of the arts and creation of “the first systematically organized library in Mesopotamia and the ancient Middle East,” among ...

The Standard of Ur, dating to ca. 2500 B.C., is a foot-and-a-half-long box decorated with mosaics representing a Sumerian king (enthroned above) celebrating with his retinue in the top scene. The ...