In 1849, English explorer Austen Henry Layard discovered a series of clay tablets in the ruins of Nineveh. Once upon a time, Nineveh was a flourishing city and the capital of the mighty Assyrian ...

The specific tablet that has caused such excitement is a school text listing kings who ruled at the end of the third millennium BC. Other known copies of this same royal list also include Gilgamesh, ...

The earliest aerial photograph of Jerusalem (lower left) with an oval fortification visible on a hill in the upper right. (Library of Congress) A peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious journal Near ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Ancient Assyrian texts detailed a legal system of paying blood money for murdered merchants. The blood money system created a ...

Archaeologists in Jerusalem have unearthed a 2,700-year-old Assyrian inscription in clay that could shine a light on key events detailed in the Old Testament. “For me as a historian, this is somewhat ...

In his new book “Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire” (Basic Books), Yale professor Eckart Frahm offers a comprehensive history of the ancient civilization (circa 2025 BCE to 609 ...

In Lord Byron’s 1821 play “Sardanapalus,” the king of the title laments that the glory of his empire will someday fade into oblivion. “Time shall quench full many a people’s records, and a hero’s acts ...