Foundation figure in the form of a nail surmounted by the bust of a god (Sumerian, Early Dynastic III period, 2600–2300 BCE), copper alloy (courtesy private collection, via Morgan Library & Museum) ...

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.

For decades, paleontologists have agonized over a strange Sumerian statue found in central Iraq. The figurine depicts a mammal that some researchers suspect could be a suriving specimen of the ancient ...

GOLD-encrusted and splendid, Tutankhamun’s tomb changed perceptions of archaeology in Europe and the United States on its discovery by Howard Carter in 1922, and the resulting wave of Egyptomania ...