The goddess Astarte in the Late Bronze Age The goddess Astarte As early as about 3000 BC, Astarte was a Semitic goddess of love and fertility. People worshipped her in Mesopotamia and in the [...]
A carving of the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda, from the Louvre museum in Paris Who is Ahura Mazda? About 1500 BC, people in India and Iran worshipped a sky god they called [...]
Grindstone from Syria, about 1500 BC (Louvre Museum) Where did they live? Most married women in West Asia lived with their husband's family, so young married women took orders from [...]
West Asian girls: An enslaved woman stands behind a free Elamite woman who is spinning (600s BC) Women were oppressed In West Asia, even more than in most other state societies all [...]
Skeleton of a salt miner from Sassanid Iran Who worked in ancient mines? Mining was a dangerous job. So most people in the ancient world didn't want to do it. [...]
Inheritance: an Akkadian will (in the Louvre museum, Paris) A will written in cuneiform This is the will of a man named Baal-Karad from Syria, who lived about 1300 BC, in the [...]
West Asian people: Ur-Nanshe, the king's chief musician in Mari, 2400s BC Oppression of women What we notice most about the way people lived in West Asia is the widespread [...]
A Parthian noblewoman This is a story from the Parthian Empire, but the earliest written version that we still have is by the Islamic poet Gorgani, about 1050 AD: King Mobad of Marv saw the beautiful [...]
Sohrab and Rustem: The death of Sohrab (Iranian painting) Where did this story come from? This story is probably an old Indo-European story that Persian people told even before they moved south into Iran [...]
This inscription from Kandahar, in Afghanistan, has Greek writing at the top, translated into the Aramaic alphabet at the bottom. The Mauryan Indian king Ashoka put it up about 258 BC. [...]
