People likely worshipped together, blending spiritual and daily life. The art, like wall paintings and decorated bull skulls, ...

This process of urbanization has proven difficult to study in northern Arabia, due in part to a lack of well-preserved archaeological sites in the region compared with better understood areas such as ...

Forgotten Giants: Were There Really Giants in Ancient Times? One of the most enduring myths of humankind is that pertaining to giants. In almost every major civilization and culture in the world, ...

In Between Symbols and Language For this study, researchers started 6,000 years ago, in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, which is located in what is now Iraq. Uruk was a major trade hub, reaching as far ...

A massive Maya landscape has been hiding under a forested area of southern Mexico. The newfound city, dubbed Valeriana, spans an area roughly the size of Beijing and has “all the hallmarks of a ...

Example of a cylinder seal (left) and its design imprinted onto clay (right) (Franck Raux © 2001 Grand Palais RMN, Musée du Louvre via Courthouse News) SAN DIEGO ...

New research traces Mesopotamia origins of writing back to trade symbols. Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art / CC0 Researchers have found the origins of writing and explained that the world’s oldest ...

The origins of writing in ancient Mesopotamia and beyond may rest on a group of cylindrical seals. A team of archeologists from the University of Bologna in Italy has identified a series of ...

The victims, part of ancient child sacrifice rituals, included some infants with elongated skulls. This is one of the latest sacrificial sites found at Pampa La Cruz near the coastal city of Trujillo ...

Some of the symbols on these cylinder seals correspond to those used in proto-cuneiform, a form of proto-writing used in Mesopotamia. The finding indicates that the invention of writing in ...

The finding reinforces an idea proposed in earlier research: that cuneiform script — which was developed in early Mesopotamia around 3100 B.C. and is thought to be the earliest writing system ...