Mesopotamia, situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is recognized as the earliest cradle of civilization due to ...

For more than a century, the standard story has held that Sumerian cities rose only after powerful rulers dug vast canal networks between the Tigris and Euphrates. Those canals unlocked large-scale ...

More than five thousand years ago, in the fertile lowlands of southern Mesopotamia, the world’s first cities began to rise from the mud. Historians have long credited this explosion of ...

In the lands of ancient Mesopotamia, a team of archaeologists and geologists has accomplished a remarkable feat. They have successfully mapped a large and complex network of irrigation canals ...

Leonard Woolley’s excavation of Ur yielded an archaeologist’s dream: a series of intact burials from one of the world's most important ancient cities. Dating from 2600-2300 B.C., a decorative bull's ...

IRRIGATION is of such paramount irmfance to extensive tracts in India, and to the whole of Egypt, that it is in these countries that irrigation works have been carried out on the largest scale, and ...

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 ...

New research introduces a paleoenvironmental model in which tidal dynamics influenced the earliest development of agriculture and sociopolitical complexity in Sumer. The earliest network of ...

Revolutionary new research challenges long-held assumptions about the origins of urban civilization in ancient Mesopotamia, revealing that tidal dynamics at the head of the Persian Gulf were ...

A study in ancient Mesopotamia reveals that early Sumerian cities thrived due to natural tidal irrigation, where river water pushed inland by tides fertilized fields This natural system provided ...

Woods Hole, Mass. (August 20, 2025) -- A newly published study challenges long-held assumptions about the origins of urban civilization in ancient Mesopotamia, suggesting that the rise of Sumer was ...