To recount the failure (of a utopia) is to fail in the very act of recounting. Fragments of truth -- what is nevertheless conveyed. Imagine a text about the notes for a text that was never written. I recall a trip in the 2000s to Mesopotamia, to Mardin and Midyat, together with my mother and in the company of a journalist and family friend who had written two reports -- one about Yazidis, the...
Have you ever wondered what it felt like to walk through the bustling markets of ancient Rome or stand beneath the towering pyramids of Egypt? These eight carefully selected books offer something magical: they transport you directly into the heart of civilisations that shaped our modern world.
(BBC) Ancient cultures had vastly different interpretations of the dramatic natural phenomenon. In the days after a Jacobite uprising was quashed in England in 1716, strange lights were seen streaking across the night skies. They were variously described as looking like "pure flame", "something resembling the pipes of an organ", and a "shower of blood".
The earliest form of the signature came from ancient Iraq in the form of cylinder seals. Mesopotamians, the ancient inhabitants of the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, are credited for many firsts in human history, including writing, urbanism and the state. Among these inventions, cylinder seals are perhaps the most distinctive but least known.
Do you worry about things? Do you wake up in the middle of the night, sweating about what might happen to you, to your family, to the world in general? I do. If you do too, rest assured you're not alone. It's a natural human trait, and it's something people have been doing for millennia.
The ancient copper industry in the Sultanate of Oman serves as compelling evidence of an advanced civilisation that evolved into a leading industrial power nearly five thousand years ago. Historical records from Sumerian and Assyrian civilisations document copper exports from Oman to Mesopotamia, while numerous archaeological sites across the country reveal extensive smelting remnants that...