In the heart of North and East Syria's Jazira Canton (Cizîrê), on the main street of Al-Hasakah (Hesekê), there is a small shop where the moment you step inside the scent of the past wraps around you. Shelves, walls and even the floor are crowded with hundreds of objects. Kurdish kilims sit beside Armenian copper trays. Arab pottery stands next to Yazidi symbols.
We think of ancient civilisations as operating very differently from the way our economy works today. Yet the Bronze Age Assyrians living in Mesopotamia, around 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, began the basis of modern capitalism, in a region spanning most of modern-day Iraq, eastern Syria and southeastern Turkey. The Assyrian empire was the root of what many scholars would now call "the West".
To recount the failure (of a utopia) is to fail in the very act of recounting. Fragments of truth -- what is nevertheless conveyed. Imagine a text about the notes for a text that was never written. I recall a trip in the 2000s to Mesopotamia, to Mardin and Midyat, together with my mother and in the company of a journalist and family friend who had written two reports -- one about Yazidis, the...
Have you ever wondered what it felt like to walk through the bustling markets of ancient Rome or stand beneath the towering pyramids of Egypt? These eight carefully selected books offer something magical: they transport you directly into the heart of civilisations that shaped our modern world.
(BBC) Ancient cultures had vastly different interpretations of the dramatic natural phenomenon. In the days after a Jacobite uprising was quashed in England in 1716, strange lights were seen streaking across the night skies. They were variously described as looking like "pure flame", "something resembling the pipes of an organ", and a "shower of blood".
The earliest form of the signature came from ancient Iraq in the form of cylinder seals. Mesopotamians, the ancient inhabitants of the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, are credited for many firsts in human history, including writing, urbanism and the state. Among these inventions, cylinder seals are perhaps the most distinctive but least known.