Free Republic

Researchers have discovered a 5,000-year-old tavern hidden 19 inches underground in southern Iraq, according to a Jan. 23 press release from the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). Archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pisa conducted the excavation beginning in 2019, Smithsonian Magazine reported. The team used advanced technology, including drone imagery and magnetometry, to identify the site’s layout. The site, located in the ancient city of Lagash, offers clues about the lives of everyday people who lived in southern Mesopotamia around 2700 B.C.E. Inside the open-air eating space, archaeologists found benches, an oven, a clay refrigerator called...

The paper uses newly examined inscriptions from a set of ancient silver beakers to propose a method for reading the symbols that make up Linear Elamite... 5,000 years ago, in the thriving city of Susa, on the fringe of the great Mesopotamian plain and the edge of the vast Iranian plateau that rises to the east...was at the heart of an urban society spanning much of what is today southwestern Iran. The city’s western neighbors, the Sumerians, dubbed its residents the Elamites. French archaeologists digging in Susa at the turn of the 20th century uncovered evidence of a writing system...

Drought May Have Killed Sumerian Language Tia Ghose LiveScience Staff Writer Date: 04 December 2012 Time: 11:35 AM ETThe ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform, shown here on a clay tablet documenting barley rations issued monthly to adults and children. The language may have died out as a result of a 200-year drought 4,200 years ago. CREDIT: Public Domain SAN FRANCISCO — A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says. Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues. But several pieces...

A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says. Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues. But several pieces of archaeological and geological evidence tie the gradual decline of the Sumerian civilization to a drought. The findings, which were presented Monday here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, show how vulnerable human society may be to climate change, including human-caused change....

Gilgamesh tomb believed found Archaeologists in Iraq believe they may have found the lost tomb of King Gilgamesh - the subject of the oldest book in history. The Epic Of Gilgamesh - written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2,500 years before the birth of Christ - commemorated the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name. Now a German-led expedition has discovered what is thought to be the entire city of Uruk - including, where the Euphrates once flowed, the last resting place of its famous King. "I don't want to say...

Gilgamesh Tomb Believed Found Posted 01-25-2005 10:02:40 (GMT 1-25-2005 (BBC) -- Archaeologists in Iraq believe they may have found the lost tomb of King Gilgamesh - the subject of the oldest "book" in history. The Epic Of Gilgamesh - written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2,500 years before the birth of Christ - commemorated the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name. Now, a German-led expedition has discovered what is thought to be the entire city of Uruk - including, where the Euphrates once flowed, the last resting place of its famous...

Gilgamesh tomb believed found Archaeologists in Iraq believe they may have found the lost tomb of King Gilgamesh - the subject of the oldest "book" in history. The Epic Of Gilgamesh - written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2,500 years before the birth of Christ - commemorated the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name. Now, a German-led expedition has discovered what is thought to be the entire city of Uruk - including, where the Euphrates once flowed, the last resting place of its famous King. "I don't want to say...

Along with inventing writing, the wheel, the plow, law codes and literature, the Sumerians are also remembered as some of history's original brewers... dating back to the fourth millennium B.C. The brewing techniques they used are still a mystery, but their preferred ale seems to have been a barley-based concoction so thick that it had to be sipped through a special kind of filtration straw. The Sumerians prized their beer for its nutrient-rich ingredients and hailed it as the key to a "joyful heart and a contented liver." ... The Sumerian invention of cuneiform -- a Latin term literally meaning...

How long have humans brewed beer? Patrick McGovern, the world's foremost historian of ancient brews, hints in Ancient Brews (2017) that this activity has been around possibly at least for 11,000 years based on vessels from Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia (Turkey). How sophisticated was brewing in antiquity? Since the ancient artifact ca. 100 CE known as the "Baghdad Battery" was discovered in the 1930's, the purpose for which it was used has been a mystery. Wilhelm Koenig, a German curator of the Baghdad Museum, discovered it near Ctesiphon - the Sassanid capital and previously in the Parthian Empire around 1936...

Hasanlu developed into a significant commercial and production center during the early Iron Age (1400-800 B.C.), owing to its location on important trade and communication routes between Mesopotamia and Anatolia. The citadel at the center of the settlement contained an array of monumental buildings, including palaces, temples, and large multi-columned halls. The evidence Danti is studying confirms that the citadel met with a violent end. Many buildings were ransacked and burned, which caused them to collapse. In addition, the remains of more than 250 people were uncovered, some with signs of systematic execution. "The horrific level of violence evident in...

...the pillar sat in British Museum for 150 years until Irving Finkel, a curator in the Middle East department, deciphered the Sumerian cuneiform writing on the cylinder this year. As it turns out, the object, now on view in an exhibit called "No Man's Land," was erected to establish a border between the warring city states of Lagash and Umma, located in present-day southern Iraq. According to the museum, the two cities were disputing over a fertile area called Gu'edina or the 'Edge of the Plain.' Around 2400 B.C. Enmetena, king of Lagash, had the pillar erected to stake his...

Excavations at an archaeological site in Bahrain are shedding light on one of the oldest trading civilisations. The site in Bahrain, thought to be the location of the enigmatic Dilmun civilisation Dilmun, one of most important ancient civilisations of the region and said to date to the third millennium BC, was a hub on a major trading route between Mesopotamia - the world's oldest civilisation - and the Indus Valley in South Asia. It is also believed that Dilmun had commercial ties with ancient sites at Elam in Iran, Alba in Syria and Haittan in Turkey. "For 4,000 years this...

Sumerians settled in Mesopotamia, an area of modern Iraq known as the cradle of civilization, more than 6,000 years ago, where they invented writing, the wheel, the plough, irrigation, the 24-hour day and the first city-states. Mission co-leaders Licia Romano and Franco D'Agostino of Rome's Sapienza University said Tuesday they discovered one of their ancient ports in Abu Tbeirah, a desert site about 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) south of the town of Nasiriyah. The port's basin, measuring 130 meters (142 yards) in length and 40 meters (44 yards) wide, with a capacity equal to nine Olympics-sized pools, may have also...

A clay tablet that has baffled scientists for 150 years has been identified as a witness's account of the asteroid suspected of being behind the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Researchers who cracked the cuneiform symbols on the Planisphere tablet believe that recorded an asteroid thought to have been more than half a mile across. The tablet, found by Henry Layard in the remains of the library in the royal place at Nineveh in the mid-19th century, is thought to be a 700 B.C. copy of notes made by a Sumerian astronomer watching the night sky. He referred to the...

Iraqi police have confiscated scores of artifacts and arrested two smugglers in the southern Province of Dhiqar, al-Zaman news reported on Monday... The two smugglers in question have long been dealing in stolen relics. One police source was quoted as saying on condition of anonymity: "Interior Ministry forces in coordination with the Iraqi army seized 64 archaeological pieces as well as 114 bronze coins in a district of al-Fajir." The province of Dhiqar holds some of the most archaeologically precious excavation mounds in Iraq. Its historical treasures have turned it into a hub for smugglers and illegal diggers. Many of...

This has cast doubt on the popular theory that Mesopotamian brewers used to crumble flat bread made from barley or emmer into their mash. The so-called "bappir" (Sumerian for "beer bread") is never counted as bread in the administrative texts, but in measuring units, like coarsely ground barley. Damerow also points out that the high degree of standardisation, which meant that the quantities of raw materials allocated to the brewers by the central administration remained exactly the same over long periods, sometimes even decades, makes it difficult to base any recipes on them. According to Damerow, even the "Hymn of...

Introduction - Investigations of Bolivia Fuente Magna and the Monolith of Pokotia The following material is reprinted by permission from Bernardo Biadós Yacovazzo & Freddy Arce, OIIB - Omega Institute Investigations (Bolivia), INTI - NonGovernmental Organizacion (Bolivia). A large stone vessel, resembling a libation bowl, and now known as the Fuente Magna, was originally discovered in a rather casual fashion by a country peasant from the ex-hacienda CHUA, property of the Manjon family situated in the surrounding areas of Lake Titicaca about 75/80 km from the city of La Paz. The site where it was found has not been...

Online dictionary helps unravel Sumerian language Digital technology facilitates research Kyle Cassidy Special to The Daily Star Scholars studying ancient writing systems to reconstruct the societies they belonged to are increasingly turning to digital dictionaries in an effort to accelerate their work. Among the institutions taking advantage of the considerable benefits offered by the digitizing process is the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which is drawing on the latest digital technology to write a Sumerian dictionary. Four thousand years ago, in the Sumerian city of Nippur, scribes were attending classes to learn a relatively new and privileged...

...my friends like Asko Parpola, Professor Mahadevan, and the Russians Professors who have worked on this subject. They have all been working on the assumption that the language of the Indus people was Dravidian, that the people who build the Indus Civilization are Dravidian. But unfortunately I, as well as my friend Prof. B.B. Lal in India, have not been able to agree with this... On the other hand, I have been talking to Prof. Parpola that certainly this is an agglutinative language, there is no doubt. That has been accepted by all of us. Dravidian is an agglutinative language....

By DOUG MELLGREN, Associated Press Writer April 19, 2002, 4:42 AM EDT OSLO, Norway -- Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who crossed the Pacific on a balsa log raft to prove his theories of human migration, has died at 87. Heyerdahl, whose book "Kon-Tiki" on the daring 101-day voyage sold millions of copies, stopped taking food, water or medication in early April after being diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. He died Thursday night in his sleep at home in Colla Michari, Italy, said his son, Thor Heyerdahl Jr. Heyerdahl had been hospitalized near there in late March when he...