A few thousand years ago, ancient Mesopotamia became the first civilization that engineered water infrastructure to drive native agricultural systems. That created earliest irrigation systems known humankind. The Mesopotamians also won success in creating successful irrigation-driven agriculture arid and semi-arid conditions. Paradoxically, this very with a major factor triggered collapse of Me...

The study of pottery can be used to provide insight into past cultures. Pottery is ubiquitous on archaeological sites in the Near East and because of its durability; fragments often survive longer than artifacts made from less-durable materials. This study addresses the use of pottery to answer the question: Were Mesopotamia and Elam trading partners from 3000 to 2500 B.C.? Located in present d...

Many medical and therapeutic cuneiform texts have been recovered from sites in ancient Mesopotamia, but no specifically surgical text has yet been found. Although it is possible that surgical texts may be found in the future, it is rather unlikely. Their absence cannot be taken as proof that the ancient Mesopotamians did not practise surgery; it is probable that surgical techniques were handed ...

No collection of laws from the iNeo-Assyrian period is known to us. If a text of this kind had ever existed, it seems highly likely that it would have been part of Assurbanipal's famous library in Nineveh. But neither in Nineveh nor in twenty-three excavated sites located in different parts of the empire have archaeologists have succeeded in unearthing so much as a fragment of such a text. In a...

The ChaldoAssyrians (also known as Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syriacs) are the indigenous people of Mesopotamia and have a history spanning over 6700 years. Today's ChaldoAssyrians are the descendants of the ancient multiethnic Assyrian empire and one of the earliest civilizations emerging in Mesopotamia. Although the Assyrian empire ended in 612 B.C., history is replete with recorded details of...

A model of irrigation agriculture is applied to southern Mesopotamian for the areas around Nippur and Uruk. Field systems around late third millennium BC (Ur III period) cities are modeled in order to understand the effects of salinization and what strategies might limit progressive salinization that hinders agricultural yields. Scholars have long suspected that progressive salinization may con...