Collections
Some 5000 years ago, writing developed in the lower valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and spread from there to the rest of ancient Mesopotamia, approximately present-day Iraq. The writing, called cuneiform ("wedge-shaped"), spread from there over the entire Near East. The Babylonian Collection houses the largest assemblage of cuneiform ins...
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Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, was the fertile river plain where civilization was born and where writing first appeared. Southern Mesopotamia was under the control of a series of kings from 3000 B.C. to the 6th century B.C. In its early history, Mesopotamia was a collection of agricultural city-states. These later ga...
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The importance of the Mesopotamian holy city, Nippur (Fig. 1), is reflected even today in the great size of the mound, Nuffar (Fig. 2), located between Baghdad and Basra in southern Iraq. Nippur was one of the longest-lived sites, beginning in the prehistoric Ubaid period (c. 5000 B. C. ) and lasting until about A. D. 800, in the Islamic era...
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Special objects from the exhibition Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur are now on display on the second floor of the Museum near the main Museum Shop. The full exhibition will return to Penn Museum on or after 2012.
This is a renowned collection from the Royal Cemetery at Ur (in modern-day Iraq), including a famous gold and lapis lazuli bullhead...
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This pair of images from space shows a portion of the southern Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula in the country of Oman. On the left is a radar image of the region around the site of the fabled Lost City of Ubar, discovered in 1992 with the aid of remote sensing data....
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The Jerablus Tahtani Project, North Syria, is an interdisciplinary research programme designed to investigate four key themes: the precocious expansion of the Uruk civilisation in the 4th millennium BC, secondary state formation in Early Bronze Age Syria, environmental and political reasons for widespread urban recession in the late 3rd millennium ...
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An Exhibit of Judaica in honor of the opening of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. 1 Kings 8:65...
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In the 1960s Deh Luran was the focus of research designed to illuminate the development of agriculture, the concurrent development of early villages and towns, and the first complex societies. The research was undertaken by various U.S. teams, in cooperation with the Archaeological Service of Iran, and with the support of the U.S. National Science ...
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