Twitter users are attempting to decipher an ancient Sumerian joke that involves a dog who — you guessed it — walks into a bar. The @dephsofwikipedia Twitter account shares random interesting and weird ...

Experts have a new theory about a cache of Early Bronze Age gold and silver objects unearthed by Russian archaeologist Nikolai Veselovsky way back in 1897: the long, thin tubes were actually ancient ...

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This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. Listen to part two here. This episode originally aired on August 5, 2022. In the late 1800s, archeologists in Iraq ...

Picking one period or dynasty to represent the entirety of this era was far too difficult. So I’ve decided that I will be dedicating two blog posts to Near Eastern art. Today’s blog post will be ...

Miguel Civil, a scholar and researcher at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, was a leading expert on the Sumerian language, the earliest known written language. “No one has known Sumerian ...

All that’s left today of an ancient boat discovered in 2018 in what was formerly Uruk is the bitumen, black tar that once coated its framework of reeds, palm leaves, or wood. That fragile organic ...

Written sources from Mesopotamia suggest that kissing in relation to sex was practiced by the peoples of the ancient Middle East 4,500 years ago. Recent research has hypothesised that the earliest ...