Mesopotamian Bulletins

In this new post, Assyriologist Cécile Michel tells us about a 3,300-year-old bilingual cuneiform tablet recently discovered in Anatolia. The first...

Architects have always drawn up plans, graphic representations of the buildings they were commissioned to construct. Mesopotamian architects left...

A tomographic scanner, specially designed to provide a high-definition view of cuneiform tablets enclosed in their clay envelopes, has completed its...

Although wars and conflicts date back to the origins of humanity, the oldest peace treaties date back to the 3rd millennium BCE. Assyriologist Cécile...

A seal is an object on which figures are engraved in negative, and whose imprint is affixed to documents or objects to authenticate and seal them...

Cuneiform writing, invented by the Sumerians in the second half of the fourth millennium BCE, was used to record a dozen different languages. The...

In the digital age, our archives are increasingly compact and ephemeral: we have partly replaced paper with files on the computer, organised in...

Cuneiform documents from Mesopotamia suggest that witnesses were an essential part of the legal system from the earliest times, and that perjury was...

Historians who decipher cuneiform texts regularly come across the names of ancient cities that they are unable to locate on a map. They likewise have...

In the two earthquakes that devastated south-east Turkey and north-west Syria on 6 February 2023, many of the inhabitants of high-rises built...

In the 1930s, Agatha Christie accompanied her husband to several archaeological sites in Iraq and Syria. These trips were to inspire the novelist, as...

This year we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script by Jean-François Champollion. The figurative...

The history of ancient Mesopotamia is based on more than a million cuneiform texts unearthed to date. Until the end of the 20th century CE, this...

While two distinct forms of writing developed in the second half of the 4th millennium BCE in Mesopotamia and Egypt, there is no record of writing in...

In this period of heat waves when the earth is cracking and the rivers are at their lowest, archaeologists sometimes make unexpected discoveries. The...

The looting of antiquities is increasingly making the headlines. There are several reasons for this. Impressive quantities of archaeological artefacts...

The vast majority of cuneiform texts discovered on sites in the ancient Near East were written on fresh clay shaped into pads that we call "tablets"...

Archaeologists are back in Iraq. First in Iraqi Kurdistan since the mid-2000s, they have also resumed their activities in the south of the country...

You may have been surprised, when reading some of the texts of the Mesopotamian Bulletin blog, to discover the use of the word "manuscript" to denote...

On Tuesday, 3 August 2021, crates from the United States were the focus of a ceremony in Baghdad. They arrived on the plane carrying the Iraqi Prime...

While the world has been slowed down by the pandemic, archaeologists, many of whom were unable to do fieldwork in 2020, are taking stock of their...

The equivalent of this Latin proverb can already be found in Mesopotamia as: "In the city of the lame, a cripple is the messenger." Similarly, the...

Libraries are a common cultural asset. They are currently some of the last places of culture still open in these times of lockdown and curfews due to...

Today, every French scientific institution has a scientific integrity contact person (Référent·e Intégrité Scientifique) in charge of investigating...

Taram-Kubi lived in Assur (not far from Mosul in Iraq) in the first half of the 19th century BCE. She was probably still young when she married...

Cuneiform scripts, in use throughout the Near East for more than three millennia, slowly died out during the first millennium BCE and finally...

Among the numerous archaeological excavations carried out in Iraqi Kurdistan over the past decade, in September 2019 an Italian team led by Daniele...

The lockdown imposed on a large part of the world's population due to the COVID-19 pandemic has forced archaeologists, like so many others, to...

As the coronavirus epidemic, after having developed in China, is spreading at an increasing rate in the rest of the world, one may wonder what...

Historians and archaeologists of antiquity are increasingly using digital humanities to archive, organise and interrogate their data. What if...

Dishes, labels on containers or bundles of goods, even cuneiform tablets, all objects made of finely prepared clay, regularly show imprints of other...

In early March, a stone stele inscribed in cuneiform and decorated with reliefs – a kudurru – dating from the late 12th century BCE was seized at...

On the right bank of the Tanjaro River in Iraqi Kurdistan, in the foothills of the Zagros, 5 km south-west of the city of Souleymaniyeh, lies the site...

On 13 January 2019, the world of Assyriology was sad to learn of the death of Miguel Civil at the age of 92. Born at the same time as the discipline...

On 31 October 2018, an inscribed Neo-Assyrian relief was sold on auction at Christie's New York for almost $31 million. This record sale for an...

The Kültepe site, located to the northeast of Kayseri, in Central Anatolia (Turkey), seems to...

A fragment of a recently published tablet sheds new light on the role played by Shamhat, the prostitute who transformed Enkidu into a civilised being...

Since 2003, there has been an explosion in the illegal trafficking of antiquities originating from Iraq. Thousands of objects, including cuneiform...

Some researchers at the universities of Yale and Harvard have cooked three Babylonian stews whose recipes were gleaned from four cuneiform tablets...

Since the middle of the 2000s, archaeologists, flushed out of southern Iraq and Syria by war, have focused their attention on Iraqi Kurdistan. In this...

Since ancient times, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have served as waterways, particularly for the transportation of bulky goods. However, the Tigris...

Notwithstanding the serious security issues they face, in the last few years archaeologists have resumed their work in the south of Iraq. Their...

During the three thousand or so years that cuneiform script was used, Mesopotamian scribes tirelessly copied out texts as part of their education...

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, vaunted by the Greek-speaking authors, for a long time intrigued both scholars...

In our Gregorian calendar, which has been in force since 1582, the counting of years adopts as its starting point the dawn of the Christian era, which...

A life-size replica of the Code of Hammurabi, one of the most ancient compendiums of law, which provides a glimpse of Babylonian society in the...

Among the hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets unearthed in the Near East, various groups of texts bear witness to the Babylonians’ knowledge of...

In mid-July, after three years of occupation by ISIS, the city of Mosul in Iraq was officially liberated. A colleague and friend, a long-standing dean...

The fifteenth and final volume of the Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie (RIA, The Encyclopaedia of the Cultures of the...