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If the cost of digging a trench is 9 gin, and the trench has a length of 5 ninda and is one-half ninda deep, and if a worker’s daily load of earth costs 10 gin to move, and his daily wages are 6 se of silver, then how wide is the canal? Or, a better question: if you were a tutor of Babylonian scribes some 4,000 years ago, holding a clay tablet on which this problem was incised with cuneiform indentations — the very tablet that can now be seen with 12 others from that Middle Eastern civilization at the...

The great Library of Alexandria, established by Ptolemy II (circa 280 BC), has come to symbolize the receptacle of knowledge of Classical civilization. This great repository was barbarously razed in the Middle Ages. At its height, the Library contained an estimated forty thousand volumes on a wide variety of topics. It held works on astronomy, mathematics, physics, medicine, and philosophy -- many of which were copied from the hieroglyphic and cuneiform texts of the Egyptians and Babylonians. It also stored histories of all the countries of the known world: histories of Egypt, of Babylonia, of Persia, of the lands of...

Iraq's Last Jews - Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval and Escape from Modern Babylon Edited by Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha and Robert Shasha Introduction by Prof. Shmuel Moreh Palgrave-Macmillan 211 pp., $75.99 (hardcover) How does one explain the reason why a prosperous community of 140,000 people, with a history and heritage of 2,600 years, uproots itself en masse, and leaves Iraq, the country which it helped modernize in all areas - government and politics, economy, medicine, education, literature, poetry and music? An explanation for this extraordinary historical phenomenon is found in Iraq's Last Jews. This book includes testimonies of 19...

Simon Rawidowicz was one of world Jewry's seminal thinkers of the 20th century. A driving force behind the creation of Brandeis University, Rawidowicz was a prolific writer and scholar, a master of the Hebrew language, and the founder of two Jewish publishing houses. Although an early supporter of Zionism as a student in Berlin in the 1920s, Rawidowicz broke with the movement's ideology of "the negation of the Diaspora."

BASRA — Iraqi Security Forces recently uncovered hundreds of historical artifacts during two raids in northern Basra. The 228 ancient artifacts included Sumerian and Babylonian sculpture, gold jewelry and other items from ancient Mesopotamia.“This is my favorite item,” said Iraqi Col. Ali Sabah, commander of the Basra Emergency Battalion that led the operation, holding a piece of gold jewelry. “It’s gold from the Babylon ages and about 6,000 years old. It doesn’t have a price.”“I’m very happy because this is my civilization’s heritage,” he said.The Basra Emergency Battalion led raid operated from tips that smugglers intended to remove the...

CHICAGO, IL, USA -- An expert on cuneiform and a doctor have teamed up to find that medicine 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia was sophisticated and effective. In fact, patients in Assyria probably got more useful treatment than anyone in Europe before the nineteenth century, JoAnn Scurlock and Burton R. Andersen told the Chicago Tribune. Scurlock, who holds a doctorate in Assyriology from the University of Chicago, and Andersen, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Illinois, examined the available medical texts in cuneiform. They found descriptions of procedures still performed, like draining pus from the lungs and chest...

BAGHDAD -- Archaeological sites in southern Iraq have been systematically looted for over two years, but experts say that the dig will have to go much deeper to find out where thousands of lost artifacts have ended up. "The complete lack of knowledge is devastating," says archaeologist Elizabeth Stone, who spent years excavating the Old Babylonian city of Mashkan Shapir. "One article said that 1 billion Iraqi dinars worth of artifacts had been smuggled to Syria, but that's absurd. We just don't know what's gone," she says. The mystery has emerged as new site protection forces finally begin to make...

Cyrus the Great Cylinder, The First Charter of Human Rights By 546 BCE, Cyrus had defeated Croesus, the Lydian king of fabled wealth, and had secured control of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, Armenia, and the Greek colonies along the Levant. Moving east, he took Parthia (land of the Arsacids, not to be confused with Parsa, which was to the southwest), Chorasmis, and Bactria. He besieged and captured Babylon in 539 and released the Jews who had been held captive there, thus earning his immortalization in the Book of Isaiah. When he died in 529, Cyrus's kingdom extended as...

As the last recognized rabbi in Saddam Hussein's police state, 37-year-old Emad Levy, in this recent photo with his father Ezra, 82, took on chore after chore to serve the 35 elderly men and women who survive today as the bedraggled remnant of Baghdad's once flourishing Jewish community (KRT) Emad Levy, the last recognized rabbi in Saddam Hussein's police state, became a rabbi almost by default: when the last ordained rabbi fled the country in 1999, Levy was pressed to assume the title because he knew enough Hebrew to lead Baghdad's Jewish community of 35 men and women in...

The New York Times reported yesterday that what began on Tuesday "as a hunt for an ancient Jewish text at secret police headquarters [in Baghdad,] wound up unearthing a trove of Iraqi intelligence documents and maps relating to Israel as well as offers of sales of uranium and other nuclear material to Iraq." Among the finds by the U.S. MET Alpha soldiers - the "mobile exploitation team" that has been searching for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in Iraq for the past three months - were maps featuring terrorist strikes against Israel dating to 1991, another map of Israel highlighting...

When our imminent clash with Saddam ends -- God-willing -- in victory, I think we should give serious consideration to restoring Iraq's true and original name: Babylonia. Of course, Iraq encompasses territories well beyond the ancient heartland of Babylonia, but then, so did Babylonia itself, for much of its history. Babylonia's size varied greatly, through the centuries, according to the fortunes of its kings. Kassite Babylonia, for instance, was rather small around 1400 B.C. But, by the sixth century B.C., Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian Empire had grown to huge proportions. Any Saddam sympathizers out there who feel duty-bound to feign horror at...