Ancient World Review

The Assyrian Lion-Hunt Reliefs In The British Museum

"The royal lion hunt was a very ancient tradition in Assyria and the wider region of Mesopotamia. The earliest depiction of a ruler hunting lions is found on a carved basalt monument that dates to before 3000 BC. It shows two bearded figures wearing diadems (a type of crown) who can be identified as ‘priest-kings’. One kills a lion with a spear and the other shoots at a lion with his bow and arrow. In Assyria, the lion hunt was an important symbol of royalty and the Assyrian royal seal showed a king slaying a rampant lion." Source: British Museum.

"The Assyrian kings hunted lions for political and religious purposes, to demonstrate their power. To get the lion out of his cage and onto the Syrian plains, a servant would raise a door and start running. Then the lion would get beaten by dogs and beaters, so that the lion would go to the king. The king would kill the lion from a chariot with his bow and arrow or spear. Sometimes the king would kill it on foot with a sword. He would do this by holding it by the mane and then thrusting the sword into the lion's throat. Then, when the lion was killed, the king would pour a Liquid over it and give a speech to the cities(?) god to thank him, so the lion's evil spirit wouldn't come back and haunt him. Expert spearmen and archers would protect the king. Sometimes the king would invite some nobles to accompany him." Source: Wikipedia.

Comment: I wouldn't want to be the servant who had to raise the door of the lion's cage and start running, or one of the beaters who drove the lion in the direction of the king. There must have been numerous fatalities during these hunts. Also I find it hard to believe that anyone could just walk up to a presumably enraged lion, grab it by the mane and drive a sword into its throat without getting mauled in the process. Lion hunts go wrong even when the hunters are using rifles.

Scribes In Ancient Mesopotamia

"Literacy was not widespread in Mesopotamia. Scribes, nearly always men, had to undergo training, and having successfully completed a curriculum became entitled to call themselves dubsar, which means 'scribe'. They became members of a privileged élite who, like scribes in ancient Egypt, might look with contempt upon their fellow citizens." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.

Note: In the beginning, Mesopotamian scribes were primarily involved in the recording of financial and government transactions and they were usually anonymous, but this changed as time went by and and the first literature began to appear.

"Some scribes signed their names to tablets as early as 2600 BCE. Generally, the authors of literary texts remained anonymous; however a catalogue from Nineveh listed authors and editors of some well-known compositions such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Later scribes listed their lineage, giving the names of their fathers and even earlier ancestors." Source: Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, by Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat.

UK Returns Looted Iraqi Antiquities

"A collection of 5,000-year-old antiquities looted from a site in Iraq in 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and then seized by the Metropolitan police from a dealer in London, will be returned to Baghdad this week." Source: The Guardian.

"It comes after experts at the British Museum identified not just the site they came from but the temple wall they were stolen from.

"The eight small pieces had no documentation of any kind to help the police, but the museum experts could literally read their origin. They included cone-shaped ceramics with cuneiform inscriptions identifying the site as Tello, ancient Girsu in southern Iraq [see next video] one of the oldest cities on earth recorded in the earliest form of true written language."

Excavations in Sumerian Girsu.

"Tello, the modern Arabic name for the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, is one of the earliest known cities of the world together with Uruk, Eridu and Ur. In the 3rd millennium BC Girsu was considered the sanctuary of the Sumerian heroic god. It was the sacred metropolis and centre of a city-state that lay in the south-easternmost part of the Mesopotamian alluvium [soil or sediment]. Pioneering explorations carried out between 1877 and 1933 and the decipherment of the cuneiform tablets discovered there revealed to the world the existence of the Sumerians who invented writing 5,000 years ago and may have developed a primitive form of democracy or polyarchy well before the ancient Greeks." Source: Archaeopress.

The Victory Stele of Naram-Sin, 2254-2218 B.C.E.

"A major work illustrating the imperial art of the Akkadian Dynasty, this victory stele celebrates the triumph of King Naram-Sin over a mountain people, the Lullubi. The Akkadian king led his troops over the steep slopes of the enemy territory, mercilessly crushing all resistance. The conqueror's victory march is coupled with the personal ascension of a sovereign who could now claim equal footing with the gods." Source: The Louvre.

Notes: Akkad was the capital of the Akkadian empire. According to the Ancient History Encyclopedia, "no one knows where the city of Akkad was located, how it rose to prominence, or how, precisely, it fell; yet once it was the seat of the Akkadian empire which ruled over a vast expanse of the region of ancient Mesopotamia. It is known that Akkad (also given as Agade) was a city located along the western bank of the Euphrates River possibly between the cities of Sippar and Kish (or, perhaps, between Mari and Babylon or, even, elsewhere along the Euphrates). According to legend, it was built by the king Sargon the Great (who ruled 2334-2279 BCE) who unified Mesopotamia under the rule of his Akkadian Empire and set the standard for future forms of government in Mesopotamia."

"Akkadian" was the term used "until 1869 for the language now known as Sumerian," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed., revised). "[It was the] term used since 1869 for the East Semitic language that is also known by its northern and southern dialects as Assyrian and Babylonian. The language is first attested from personal names of the mid-3rd millennium when it began to supersede Sumerian. It was written on clay, stone, and waxed writing boards in cuneiform script."

Human Sacrifices Surround Ancient Mesopotamian Tomb

"About 5,000 years ago, the Mesopotamians buried two 12-year-olds — a boy and a girl — and surrounded their slender bodies with hundreds of bronze spearheads and what appears to be eight human sacrifices, a new study finds." Source: Live Science.

"The eight human sacrifices were positioned just outside the tomb, located at the site of Basur Höyük in southeastern Turkey, the researchers said. The team determined the age of six of the human sacrifices and found that the victims ranged in age from 11 to 20 years old."

Note: Basur Höyük is a Bronze Age cemetery in Turkey. According to the Natural History Museum, "[t]he site dates to 500 years before the famous Royal Cemetery of Ur, a luxurious series of tombs that form the resting place of Mesopotamian rulers."

Note: "Human sacrifice has long been associated with the rise of hierarchical centralised societies. Recent excavation of a large cist tomb at third-millennium BC Başur Höyük, in Turkey, shows that state formation in Mesopotamia was accompanied by a fundamental change in the value of human life within local ritual economy. Osteological analysis and study of the grave goods have identified some of the dead as human sacrifices. This was indeed a retainer burial, reflecting the emergence of stratified society at a time of instability and crisis." Source: "Radical ‘royals’? Burial practices at Başur Höyük and the emergence of early states in Mesopotamia" (Abstract), Antiquity Journal, Cambridge University Press. (Access required to read full article)

Saudi Arabia's Pre-Islamic History Revealed

Notes: "To date, nearly 200 Acheulean (1) [a type of prehistoric stone tool industry] sites of Middle Pleistocene age [app. 781 - 126,000 years ago] have been recorded in Saudi Arabia. They occur with highest frequency in the central, western and southwestern provinces, and are fewer in the east toward the Gulf coast. They consist of artifacts found on the descending surface of alluvial fans - delta-shaped deposits of material left by rivers of bygone times - or on terraces, exposed by wind or water erosion, overlooking a wadi, spring or Pleistocene lake ... Where water was in plentiful supply, a dozen or more sites could appear, although not all were necessarily occupied at the same time. Usually, we believe, these sites were inhabited only temporarily, as transient stations to shelter residents for a few weeks." Source: "Early Mankind in Arabia," Aramco World.

(1) "From geological dating of sedimentary deposits, it appears that the Acheulean [stone tool industry] originated in Africa and spread to Asian, Middle Eastern, and European areas sometime between 1.5 million years ago and about 800 thousand years ago." Source: Wikipedia.

It sounds like these early hunter-gatherers passed through the region during their migrations, following river beds or moving from oasis to oasis, but the picture is still unclear. "Encompassing a landmass greater than the rest of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean combined, the Arabian peninsula remains one of the last great unexplored regions of the ancient world," according to the Cambridge University Press. I believe the earliest known period is the Mesopotamian Ubaid period (6500-3800 BCE), which covered a larger area than just Arabia.

Video from 2014.

A Stray Sumerian Tablet

"Containing six lines of cuneiform script, and roughly the size of an adult thumb, [this tablet] was donated to the [Cambridge] University Library in 1921 but then lost to sight for many years before its rediscovery in 2016, during research for the Curious Objects exhibition, held as part of the University Library’s 600th anniversary." Source: Cambridge University Library.

"The full translation of the laconic text runs as follows: 18 jars of pig fat – Balli. 4 jars of pig fat – Nimgir-ab-lah. Fat dispensed (at ?) the city of Zabala. Ab-kid-kid, the scribe. 4th year 10th month."

Note: The words Balli, Nimgir-ab-lah, etc., are thought to be personal names. According to Cambridge, "[t]he man named Balli turns up regularly in other texts from the same area during the same period of history, and seems to be an official in charge of a wide range of oils: from pig fat and butter to sesame oil and almond oil."

This clay tablet is apparently the oldest written object held at Cambridge. A 3D animation and more information about the tablet can be found here.

Lost City Of Irisagrig Comes To Life In Ancient Stolen Tablets

WARNING: Extremely irritating music. Mute the audio.

"Hundreds of ancient stolen tablets, seized from the company Hobby Lobby and returned to Iraq, provide clues about what a lost 4,000-year-old city called Irisagrig was like." Source: Live Science (May 30, 2018).

Note: "Irisagrig is a 'Sumerian city never excavated before and whose location remains unknown ... The exact location of this site has been debated among scholars [and] a number of tablets from Irisagrig have appeared on the antiquities market in recent years and may have been looted recently." (Live Science April 30, 2018)

Ancient Near Eastern Art - Sumer & Akkad

Note: "The ancient art of Mesopotamia incorporates that of Sumeria, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria, until the sixth century BCE, when Babylon fell to the Persians. Mesopotamian Sculpture (c.3000-500 BCE) includes a host of ceramic art, varieties of stone sculpture, in the form of both statues and reliefs, steles, mosaic art, carved cylinder seals and monumental architecture exemplified by Ziggurats built in Ur, Babylon, Uruk, Sialk, Nimrud and elsewhere (3200-500 BCE), and the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built in the ancient city-state of Babylon, by King Nebuchadnezzar II. Mesopotamia was also home to megalithic art like that of Catalhoyuk in Asia Minor." Source: Visual Arts Encyclopedia.

Sumerian Cuneiform Script: The Birth Of Writing

"The Sumerians were one of the earliest urban societies to emerge in the world, in Mesopotamia more than 5000 years ago. They developed a writing system whose wedge-shaped strokes would influence the style of scripts in the same geographical area for the next 3000 years. Eventually, all of these diverse writing systems, which encompass both logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic [Abjad], and syllabic systems, became known as cuneiform." Source: Ancient Scripts.

"The Sumerian writing system was adopted and modified by other contemporaneous Mesopotamian people such as the Akkadians and the Babylonians. As a spoken language, Sumerian died out around the 18th century BCE, but continued as a 'learned' written language (much like Latin was during the Middle Ages in Europe). In this way, Sumerian was used continually until the 1st century CE, making it one of the longest used writing system in history." (Ancient Scripts)

Related: How Ancient Languages Sounded: Sumerian, Aramaic, Mayan, and Others.