The story of how the first cities rose from southern Mesopotamia has long fascinated scientists and historians. Many explanations point to fertile soil, farming, and trade networks as the engines of ...

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 ...

A new interdisciplinary study shows that the rise of the first urban civilization was not solely a product of human ingenuity, but a complex response to coastal dynamics and the predictable rhythms of ...

THE great and inventive people who settled 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates (now part of Iraq), founded one of the world’s first major civilizations.

On the bitter plains of modern Iraq there remain large piles of baked bricks covered with much sand. They have sat there in silent witness to a lost religion for 4,000 years. Only in the 19th century ...

When historians look back into time to name the first civilized people, they usually pick the Sumerians, who built imposing cities, including Abraham’s Ur of the Chaldees, in southern Mesopotamia ...

SAN FRANCISCO — A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says. Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for ...