The people between the Tigris and the Euphrates built cities, wrote contracts, ran schools, and pressed all of it into mud that happened to last. That is why we know the price of bad copper in 1750 BC and how a Sumerian schoolboy got out of a beating. These stories run from the first walled towns to the archaeologists who spent a century learning to read what was left.
Every tile in a Ancient Mesopotamia game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Hammurabi had his rulings carved into a black basalt pillar more than seven feet tall. Some six centuries later the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte hauled it away to Susa, in what is now Iran, as war spoils. That is where a French expedition found it in 1902, far from the city it was written for. The stone reached the Louvre in 1904, and 282 of its legal judgments can still be read down its sides.
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Three and a half centuries before Hammurabi, a Sumerian king at Ur set down laws that survive only in fragments. Where later Babylonian law answered a lost eye with a lost eye, this code answered it with money: half a mina of silver for an eye, two shekels for a tooth. Fifty-seven laws were issued in the king's name. The two broken pieces that first brought them to light sat in the Istanbul museum's Nippur collection until a curator joined them and Samuel Noah Kramer read the Sumerian in 1952.
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Sargon of Akkad made his daughter high priestess of the moon god at Ur, and she wrote. Forty-two temple hymns are credited to her, along with poems to the goddess Inanna. The hymns end with a line no earlier writer left behind: the compiler of the tablets was En-hedu-ana, and something has been made that no one made before. Scholars still argue over how much she composed. The signature is hers.
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Akkadian kings ruled for the gods. Naram-Sin, grandson of Sargon, began writing his own name with the sign that marked a deity, the first Mesopotamian ruler known to have declared himself divine while still on the throne. His victory monument in the Louvre makes the same claim in stone: he climbs a mountain over fallen enemies wearing a horned tiara, the headgear Mesopotamian art kept for gods. Three sun disks look down on the scene.
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When Ashurnasirpal II finished his new capital at Kalhu, he threw a party and had the guest list carved in stone. The total comes to 69,574, counting delegations from abroad and the people of Kalhu itself, and the feast ran ten days. The inscription tallies a thousand fattened cattle, a thousand calves, ten thousand sheep and much more, then notes that the guests were fed, bathed, anointed and sent home. The stele surfaced in the ruins in 1951.
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Babylon's last king was more interested in old temples than in new wars. Restoring the sun god's temple at Sippar, Nabonidus had workmen dig down for the original foundations and turned up an inscription left there by Naram-Sin of Akkad. Then he put an age on it: no king before him, his cylinder says, had found that stone in 3,200 years. The real gap was about half that, and the guess is the oldest known attempt to date something dug out of the ground.
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The story goes that Sargon of Akkad was born in secret, set adrift on the Euphrates in a reed basket sealed with tar, and lifted out by Akki, a drawer of water, who raised him as a gardener. What is actually known is thinner. The oldest surviving copy of the tale was written roughly sixteen centuries after Sargon lived, and came out of Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh in the 1850s. Scholars file it with historical fiction.
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The Sumerian King List runs through ruler after ruler, and one entry stops you: Kug-Bau, the woman tavern keeper, who made firm the foundations of Kish and became king. She is the only woman the list calls king. The list also gives her a reign of a hundred years, which is a fair reminder that it is royal tradition rather than a register. Outside those few words, almost nothing about her survives.
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A praise poem written for Shulgi of Ur has the king running from Nippur to Ur and back in a single day, through a shrieking storm, so that he could preside over the same festival in both cities before sunset. The poem is his own publicity and says so plainly: he wanted the name remembered. The two cities lie about a hundred miles apart. Nobody can confirm the run. What survives is the boast, in his court's own words.
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The Sumerian King List opens with a flat announcement: after the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu. What archaeology found underneath is humbler. The earliest shrine on the spot was a mud-brick room about twelve feet by fifteen, with a low podium for offerings and a niche for the god's statue. Around the altar of a later shrine, excavators found scattered fish bones and ash. Temple was built on temple there for thousands of years, on a site settled around 5400 BC.
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The great stepped tower at Ur is really two buildings. The lowest stage is the work of Ur-Nammu; everything standing above it was rebuilt more than a thousand years later by Nabonidus, who laid fresh brick treads on the three staircases without changing their design. Woolley's team also found a shaft driven straight into the heart of the brickwork, dug by Nabonidus's workmen hunting for the foundation records of the kings before them.
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Nebuchadnezzar II faced Babylon's ceremonial gate in glazed blue brick with bulls and dragons in relief. By the time German archaeologists reached it between 1899 and 1917 the gate had crumbled, and only fragments came out of the ground. In Berlin the pieces were desalted, their glazes strengthened with paraffin, then sorted by color and motif. Teams of up to thirty people put seventy-two animal reliefs back together in about two years. It opened to the public in 1930.
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Sennacherib made Nineveh his capital and built what he called the palace without rival, inside walls pierced by fifteen gates, with parks, canals and a zoo. His grandson Ashurbanipal gathered a library there of more than thirty thousand inscribed clay tablets. In 612 BC an allied army sacked the city and burned it. The fire that ended Assyria also baked that clay hard, which is why so much of the library can still be read.
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Everyone knows the hanging gardens of Babylon. The trouble is that Babylonian royal inscriptions never describe anything of the kind, and the Greek and Roman writers who did were working centuries later and a long way off. In 2013 the Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley argued the gardens were real but Assyrian: built at Nineveh by Sennacherib, whose own inscriptions describe a garden of fruit and aromatic trees, a canal cut for elevated irrigation, and a screw for lifting water.
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On the middle Euphrates stood Mari, whose Great Royal Palace had more than two hundred and fifty rooms on the ground floor alone. French excavators under André Parrot began work in 1933 and pulled over fifteen thousand clay tablets out of the ruins: ration dockets, deliveries of animals and textiles, and above all letters between kings and their governors. That correspondence is why the diplomacy of the age is known in such detail. Hammurabi of Babylon took Mari around 1761 BC and had the city pulled down.
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A clay tablet a little bigger than a hand shows Nippur from overhead: the temple of Enlil, a park, the city wall with its gates, a canal and the Euphrates, with the distances between gates written in. The University of Pennsylvania's expedition found it in 1899. Modern survey work has shown the plan accurate to within about ten percent of the real thing. It now sits in Jena, Germany, far from the city it maps.
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Babylon's ziggurat was called Etemenanki, the house of the foundation of heaven and earth. Cuneiform records and Robert Koldewey's excavation put its square base at roughly ninety meters a side, rising in seven terraces, and it is the building usually identified with the Tower of Babel. Alexander the Great meant to rebuild it and put ten thousand soldiers to clearing the rubble. He died first, and nothing went back up.
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To water the parks of Nineveh, Sennacherib had a canal cut from the hills and carried across a valley at Jerwan on a bridge of dressed limestone. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago excavated it in 1933 and dated it to just after 700 BC. What they were looking at was a kind of structure not otherwise known anywhere before Roman times. Parts of it still stand in the fields of northern Iraq.
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Long before anyone wrote a sentence, Near Eastern farmers kept accounts with small clay tokens, a different shape for each kind of good. By about 3500 BC there were some three hundred shapes. Tokens covering a debt were sealed inside a clay envelope, and since nobody could see in, each token was first pressed against the outside. Then somebody noticed the marks were enough by themselves. The tokens went away, the marks stayed, and writing had started.
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Mesopotamian scribes counted in sixties, and the habit outlived them. The sixty minutes in an hour and the sixty seconds in a minute descend from Babylonian arithmetic, carried forward by Greek astronomers who cut each degree the same way; the twenty-four-hour day itself came from Egypt. Why sixty is genuinely unsettled. Theon of Alexandria thought it the smallest number that divides evenly by one through five. Others propose finger counting, a 360-day year, or two older systems merging. None of it is proved.
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A man named Nanni sent a clay tablet to a copper merchant called Ea-nasir at Ur. He had been promised fine ingots and did not get them, his messengers kept coming home empty-handed through enemy territory, and he wanted it on record that he had been treated with contempt. Guinness World Records lists the tablet as the oldest written customer complaint, 3,767 years old. The British Museum acquired it in 1953.
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Sumerians praised Ninkasi, whose name means the lady who fills the mouth, in a hymn written down around 1800 BC that walks through brewing step by step: a barley beerbread called bappir, mixed with sweet aromatics and baked in a big oven, then malt soaked in a jar, then sweet wort brewed with honey and wine and set to ferment. In 1989 the Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco followed it and got a beer like champagne, with a scent of dates. Whether the hymn was ever meant as a recipe is still argued.
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The Yale Babylonian Collection holds four clay tablets of recipes. Three of them go back no later than about 1730 BC, and they are the oldest known culinary recipes anywhere. One is a summary list of twenty-five stews and broths with brief directions; the other two carry fewer dishes described in much more detail. Like most premodern cooking manuals they rarely give quantities, so anyone cooking from them has to experiment. Why the collections were compiled is unknown.
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In 1923 the publisher George Plimpton bought five cuneiform tablets from the archaeologist Edgar Banks for ten dollars. One of them carried four columns and fifteen rows of numbers written in base 60. It sat in a library for twenty-two years until Otto Neugebauer and Abraham Sachs worked out in 1945 what the numbers were: Pythagorean triples, whole numbers that satisfy the right-triangle rule. The tablet predates Pythagoras by more than a thousand years.
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Mesopotamians signed documents by rolling a small engraved stone cylinder over damp clay, leaving a band of pictures that stood for one person. The carving had to be cut below the surface and in reverse, so the artist worked out the mirror image in his head before touching the stone. Owners wore their seals on a cord at the neck or wrist, or pinned to clothing, and rolled them across the lumps of clay that closed jars, baskets and storeroom doors.
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Sumerian farmers plowed with oxen behind a share that cut the furrow, and a funnel mounted behind it dropped the seed straight in. A teaching text called the Farmer's Instructions supplies the settings: eight furrows to every six meters of width, and the grain two fingers deep. Too close together, it warns, and the barley will fall over. A cylinder seal in Philadelphia shows the machine at work in the field.
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Babylonian astronomers watched the sky for centuries and kept records, and in the fifth century BC they did something new with them. They cut the band the sun travels into twelve equal parts of thirty degrees each and named every part for the constellation standing out in it. The purpose was prediction: where a planet sat in that band at a given moment was read as a message about a person's future. The zodiac in today's newspapers is theirs.
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High on a cliff in western Iran, Darius I had his story carved in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Henry Rawlinson, a British army officer, copied the lower panels himself, and for the passage he could not reach he hired a Kurdish boy to climb up and take casts in papier-mache. With three versions of one text in hand, he announced the Old Persian in 1846 and read out the Babylonian in 1851 and 1852.
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George Smith left school early and taught himself cuneiform, and the British Museum eventually hired him to sort tablets from Nineveh. In November 1872 he read a fragment describing a ship grounded on a mountain and a bird sent out to look for land. He presented it on December 3 to the Society of Biblical Archaeology, and the sensation was immediate. A London newspaper then paid for him to dig in Iraq, where he turned up the missing piece within a week.
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In the royal cemetery at Ur, Leonard Woolley uncovered a woman buried in a limestone chamber under a headdress of twenty gold leaves strung with lapis and carnelian and topped by a large gold comb. Ten rings were on her fingers, and two attendants lay in the chamber with her. Her name came from the inscription on one of three cylinder seals found on her body. The signs were read at first as Shubad; they are now read as Pu-abi.
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Digging below the royal tombs at Ur, Leonard Woolley struck a thick band of clean, water-laid soil with nothing in it, and concluded he had found the flood of Genesis. His popular book made the idea stick. The problem showed up nearby. At Eridu, seven miles away and at much the same elevation, diligent searching turned up no trace of the same flood. The silt was real. A flood that Eridu never noticed was not that Flood.
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Gameboards came out of the royal tombs at Ur, twenty squares apiece, made between about 2600 and 2400 BC. Nobody knew how they were played. Then Irving Finkel of the British Museum translated an unassuming tablet written by a Babylonian astronomer in the second century BC and found the rules for the same game. The text breaks off in a maddening way: it lays out the advanced play and assumes the reader already knows the simple version.
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A small clay tablet in the British Museum carries the oldest known map of the world. Babylon sits near the center as a long rectangle, districts and neighbors are marked around it, and the whole disc is ringed by water the scribe called bitter. Triangles point outward past the ring toward places the text fills with strange creatures. It is less a chart than an argument about where the middle of everything is.
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In late 2011 the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraqi Kurdistan was offered a batch of tablets taken by smugglers. One of them, three fragments joined, turned out to be part of Tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh, carrying nearly twenty lines nobody had read. Farouk Al-Rawi spotted it during the negotiation and urged the museum to pay eight hundred dollars. The new text puts monkeys in the Cedar Forest and makes Humbaba less an ogre than a foreign ruler.
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In 1925 Leonard Woolley was working through a Babylonian palace at Ur when he found a strange group of objects: things from different centuries and different places, stored together, with clay labels written in more than one language. One was a piece of a statue of King Shulgi, already fifteen centuries old at the time, carefully repaired to preserve its writing. The collection belonged to Ennigaldi-Nanna, priestess and daughter of Nabonidus. Woolley called it a museum.
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In 1989 the Iraqi archaeologist Muzahim Mahmud opened tombs of Assyrian queens beneath the Northwest Palace at Nimrud. Out came a gold crown, a gold mesh diadem with a tasseled fringe and agate rosettes, seventy-nine earrings, thirty finger rings, vessels of gold and rock crystal. One tomb alone yielded fourteen kilograms of gold. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 the jewelry went into a bank vault, and in June 2003 investigators pumped out the flooded basement of Baghdad's Central Bank and found it.
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