Sophisticated computation methods were developed 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia in the context of scribal schools. The basics of the computation can be detected in clay tablets written by young students educated in these scribal schools. At first glance, the mathematical exercises contained in school tablets seem to be very simple and quite familiar, and therefore, they have little attracted the...

The Warka Vase is an iconic artifact of Mesopotamia. In the absence of rigorous botanical study, the plants depicted on the lowest register are usually thought to be flax and grain. This analysis of the image identified as grain argues that its botanical characteristics, iconographical context and similarity to an archaic sign found in proto-writing demonstrates that it should be identified as ...

Just over 5,000 years ago, the earliest cities flourished in Mesopotamia and western Iran. One explanation that has been considered is that making these areas with their seasonal alternations of flooding and drought amenable to agriculture required a complex infrastructure for water retention and irrigation. Thus, only a critical mass of workforce and a certain level of organisation could make ...

I put medicine first, not because of any personal predilections, but because during my short stay in Mesopotamia the surgical cases were " snowed under " by cases of sickness. Not only so, but most surgical cases presented evidence sooner or later of non-surgical disease. It may be well to look first in a general way at the principal causes of this heavy incidence of sickness and disease.

The Writing in Early Mesopotamia (WEM) project endeavors to provide a comprehensive description of how the technology of cuneiform writing represented language. The project will investigate early cuneiform writing from the perspective of both language — how sound and meaning are systematically expressed diachronically and synchronically — and semiotics — the graphic organization and history of ...