Mesopotamia

The ancient city of Ur was excavated by C. Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and 1930s. This photo essay includes several photos taken and plans of the site drawn during Woolley's excavations, provided by the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

A collection of artifacts from C. Leonard Woolley's excavations of the Royal Cemetery at Ur, and the collection at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

The Tell Asmar sculpture hoard is a collection of 12 alabaster statues, discovered beneath the floor of the Square Temple at the Mesopotamian site of Tell Asmar.

Mesopotamia is an ancient civilization that took up pretty much everything that today is modern Iraq and Syria, a triangular patch wedged between the Tigris River, the Zagros Mountains, and the Lesser Zab River.

Akkad was the historical name of the southern region of Mesopotamia beginning during the 25th century BC

Mesopotamian Art on Loan to the Beijing World Art Museum from the University of Pennsylvania

From the Oriental Institute in Chicago, a few artifacts from the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

Assyria was an ancient civilization located in Asia during the 14th-7th century BC.

Sir Leonard Woolley was a British archaeologist and an expert in Mesopotamian studies, who also acted as intelligence agent for the British during World War I.

This brief book, part of Routledge's series entitled Approaching the Ancient World, takes as its primary mission to investigate the practices of Mesopotamian historians, and to use their data as expressed in the cuneiform texts to make inferences concerning the political and economic history

One of the earliest forms of writing, cuneiform was (probably) invented in Uruk, Mesopotamia around 3000 BC.

From the British Museum's Illuminating New Worlds project, an attractive, informative site on ancient Babylonia, Assyria, and Sumer.

The home page of the International Congress of Assyriology & Near Eastern Archaeology; contains programs of past and present meetings and other information for Assyriologists.

Leonard Woolley excavated Ur (also known as Tell al-Muqqayar) in the early decades of the 20th century. His fabulous collection is on display at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum.

The term Semitic tribes (or Semites) refers to several groups of nomads and camel pastoralists who spoke related Semitic languages and included Arabs, Aramaeans, Jews, Carthaginians, Ethiopians, Abyssinians, and Phoenicians.

Sumer was one of two Early Dynastic period (3000-2350 BC) communities in southern Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (the other was Akkad).

The on-going joint excavations at the Mesopotamian site of Hamoukar in Syria by the Oriental Institute and the Syrian Department of Antiquities have discovered evidence of a large organized battle at the site which took place about 3500 BC.

Archaeologists worried that the war in Iraq will endanger archaeological sites; and they were right.

The Ubaidian culture is a prehistoric Mesopotamian culture first identified by Jacques de Morgan around the turn of the 19th century.

French archaeologist Victor Place was a nineteenth century scholar of Mesopotamia.