Neolithic counting tokens Counting with tally sticks and tokens The earliest way of writing down numbers was to carve notches in tally sticks, and this method spread from Africa all over Europe and [...]
The constellation Orion What did Mesopotamians invent? From the Stone Age through the Islamic empires, great scientific discoveries have streamed out of West Asia. West Asia is one of the places where farming got started, [...]
The god Tammuz (probably) with grain growing from his shoulders A West Asian god Tammuz (or Dumuzi) was a West Asian god who personified growing food, like Persephone in Greece or Osiris in Egypt. [...]
The Mesopotamian god Ishtar or Inanna Who was Ishtar? Ishtar (also called Inanna) was an important god of West Asia. Beginning at least by 3000 BC the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the [...]
Who was Enlil? This is what one of the tablets that was found in the Assyrian king's library looks like. This one tells the story of the Flood. The Sumerian god [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Cuneiform writing (now in LACMA, Los Angeles) Early Sumerian writing West Asia is probably the first place in the world where people figured out how to write. (Though Egyptian people began writing [...]
Shepherd on a cylinder seal (Berlin Museum) When the Sumerian king Gilgamesh refused to fall in love with the goddess Ishtar, he gave her a lot of reasons why not, and he was [...]
