Many millennia ago, the tides turned for ancient Sumerians who built the first civilization - literally. Rising in southern Mesopotamia around 6,000 years ago, Sumer bridged a network of city-states ...

The underlying substance is Sumerian bitumen: a naturally occurring petroleum material (often called an asphalt-like “black goo”) long associated with waterproofing and adhesion, and even with ...

Miguel Civil, a scholar and researcher at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, was a leading expert on the Sumerian language, the earliest known written language. “No one has known Sumerian ...

While historians debate, what if ancient texts aren’t just stories, but survival guides? Consider the Sumerian King List—Mesopotamia’s version of a royal family scrapbook—as an early attempt to ...