The santur, an ancient musical instrument with roots in the region now known as Iran, holds a rich history and influence across various cultures. Dating back to 669 B.C., it graced Assyrian and Babylonian stone carvings, depicting it being played while suspended from the player's neck.
This is Food editor Joe Yonan's take on the traditional rice-studded meatballs called kufteh that his aunts and grandmother made on his childhood visits to Chicago, a center of Assyrian American culture. As a vegetarian, he uses vegan ground beef, and he couldn't resist creating a quick but nontraditional lemon-butter sauce out of the cooking liquid left in the pan.
A horse archer is a cavalryman armed with a bow who can shoot while riding on the back of a horse. This style of warfare appears to have developed on the open plains of Eurasia as a way to hunt and protect animal herds. In war, the combination of horse and archer proved to be incredibly effective.
(Xinhua) -- A conference on the inheritance and development of Turfan studies has attracted over 100 domestic and foreign scholars to the city of Turpan in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The sixth International Conference on Turfan Studies was held from Monday to Wednesday, during which experts shared their latest findings and visited archaeological sites.
Pah Tum is a game from the ancient civilization of Assyria, one of the first urban centers which flourished along the Tigris River Valley in the Middle East about 3800 years ago. Archaeological digs have uncovered partial game boards including an ivory example in the tomb of an Egyptian scribe named Reny-Seneb from 1800 BCE.
For the first time, a group of researchers have successfully extracted ancient DNA from a 2,900-year-old clay brick. Currently housed at the National Museum of Denmark, the clay brick originates from the palace of Neo-Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, in the ancient city of Kalhu. Known today as the North-West palace in Nimrud (modern-day northern Iraq), its construction began around 879 BCE.