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Afghanistan
Afghanistan
i/æfˈɡænɨstæn/ (Persian/Pashto: افغانستان, Afġānistān), officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming part of South Asia, Central Asia, and Greater Middle East, it is also considered to be part of a broader West Asia. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of 647,500 km2 (250,001 sq mi), making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world. It is bordered by Pakistan in the south and the east, Iran in the west, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the north, and China in the far northeast.
Afghanistan has been an ancient focal point of the Silk Road and human migration. Archaeologists have found evidence of human habitation from as far back as 50,000 BC. Urban civilization may have begun in the area as early as 3,000 to 2,000 BC. Sitting at an important geostrategic location that connects the Middle East with Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, the land has been home to various peoples through the ages and witnessed many military campaigns, notably by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and in modern era Western forces. The land also served as a source from which the Greco-Bactrians, Kushans, Saffarids, Ghaznavids, Ghorids, Timurids, Mughals and many others have risen to form major empires.
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Akkadian Empire
Coordinates: 33°6′N 44°6′E / 33.1°N 44.1°E / 33.1; 44.1
The Akkadian Empire (Akkadian URUAkkad KI, Hittite KUR A.GA.DÈ.KI "land of Akkad"; Biblical Hebrew אַכַּד Akkad) was an empire centered in the city of Akkad (Sumerian: Agade) and its surrounding region in Mesopotamia.
During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism.Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC (the exact dating being a matter of debate).
The Akkadian Empire reached its political peak between the 24th and 22nd centuries BC, following the conquests of its founder Sargon of Akkad (2334–2279 BC). Under Sargon and his successors, Akkadian language was briefly imposed on neighboring conquered states such as Elam. Akkad is sometimes regarded as the first empire in history, though there are earlier Sumerian claimants.[citation needed]
The precise archaeological site of the city of Akkad has not yet been found.[citation needed] The form Agade appears in Sumerian, for example in the Sumerian King List; the later Assyro-Babylonian form Akkadû ("of or belonging to Akkad") was likely derived from this. The etymology and meaning of Akkad (written a.ga.dèKI or URIKI) are unknown. Centuries later, the neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus mentioned in his archaeological records that Ishtar's worship in Agade was later superseded by that of the goddess Anunit, whose shrine was at Sippar—suggesting proximity of Sippar and Agade. Despite numerous searches, the city has never been found. One theory holds that Agade was situated opposite Sippar on the left bank of the Euphrates, and was perhaps the oldest part of the city of Sippar. Another theory is that the ruins of Akkad are to be found beneath modern Baghdad. Reputedly it was destroyed by invading Gutians with the fall of the Akkadian Empire.
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Anatolia
Coordinates: 39°N 32°E / 39°N 32°E / 39; 32
Anatolia (from Greek Ἀνατολή Anatolē — "east" or "(sun)rise"; also Asia Minor, from Greek: Μικρὰ Ἀσία Mikrá Asía "small Asia"; in modern Turkish: Anadolu) is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the Aegean Sea to the west. The Sea of Marmara forms a connection between the Black and Aegean Seas through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, and separates Anatolia from Thrace on the European mainland. Traditionally, Anatolia is considered to extend in the east to a line between the Gulf of Iskenderun and the Black Sea, approximately corresponding to the western two-thirds of the Asian part of Turkey. However, since Anatolia is now often considered to be synonymous with Asian Turkey, its eastern and southeastern borders are widely taken to be the Turkish borders with the neighboring countries, which are Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq and Syria, in clockwise direction.
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Babil Governorate
Babylon Province (Arabic: بابل Bābil) (or Babil Governorate) is a province in central Iraq. It has an area of 5,603 square kilometres (2,163 sq mi), with an estimated population of 1,385,783 people in 2003. The provincial capital is the city of Hillah, which lies opposite the ancient city of Babylon (بابل), on the Euphrates river.
The ancient city of Babylon in present-day Babylon Province was the capital of ancient Babylonia, situated on the Euphrates river south of Baghdad, Iraq.
The city was occupied from the 3rd millennium BC but became important early in the 2nd millennium under the kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon. The sixth king of this dynasty was Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC) who made Babylon the capital of a vast empire and is best remembered for his code of laws.
The city achieved pre-eminence when Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 BC) extended the Babylonian Empire over most of Western Asia.
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Babylon
Coordinates: 32°32′11″N 44°25′15″E / 32.53639°N 44.42083°E / 32.53639; 44.42083
Babylon (Arabic: بابل, Babil; Akkadian: Bābili(m);Sumerian logogram: KÁ.DINGIR.RAKI;Hebrew: בָּבֶל, Bābel;Greek: Βαβυλών, Babylōn) was an Akkadian city-state (founded in 1867 BC by an Amorite dynasty) of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which are found in present-day Al Hillah, Babylon Province, Iraq, about 85 kilometers (55 mi) south of Baghdad. All that remains of the original ancient famed city of Babylon today is a mound, or tell, of broken mud-brick buildings and debris in the fertile Mesopotamian plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The city itself was built upon the Euphrates, and divided in equal parts along its left and right banks, with steep embankments to contain the river's seasonal floods.
Available historical resources suggest that Babylon was at first a small town which had sprung up by the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. The town flourished and attained independence with the rise of the First Amorite Babylonian Dynasty in 1894 BC. Claiming to be the successor of the ancient Eridu, Babylon eclipsed Nippur as the "holy city" of Mesopotamia around the time an Amorite king named Hammurabi first created the short lived Babylonian Empire; this quickly dissolved upon his death and Babylon spent long periods under Assyrian, Kassite and Elamite domination. Babylon again became the seat of the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 612 to 539 BC which was founded by Chaldeans and whose last king was an Assyrian. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. After the fall of Babylon it came under the rules of the Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Roman and Sassanid empires.
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Baghdad
Baghdad (Arabic: بغداد, Baġdād, IPA: [bæɣˈdæːd]) is the capital of Republic of Iraq, as well as the coterminous Baghdad Province. The population of Baghdad as of 2011 is approximately 7,216,040, making it the largest city in Iraq, the second largest city in the Arab World (after Cairo, Egypt), and the second largest city in Western Asia (after Tehran, Iran).
Located along the Tigris River, the city was founded in the 8th century and became the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. Within a short time of its inception, Baghdad evolved into a significant cultural, commercial, and intellectual center for the Islamic World. This in addition to housing several key academic institutions (e.g. House of Wisdom) garnered the city a worldwide reputation as the "Center of Learning". Throughout the High Middle Ages, Baghdad was considered to be the largest city in the world with an estimated population of 1,200,000 people. The city was largely destroyed at the hands of the Mongol Empire in 1258, resulting in a decline that would linger through many centuries due to frequent plagues and multiple successive empires. With the recognition of Iraq as an independent state (formerly the British Mandate of Mesopotamia) in 1938, Baghdad gradually regained some of its former prominence as a significant center of Arabic culture.
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Bahrain
Bahrain (
pronunciation) (Arabic: البحرين, al-Baḥrayn) (Persian: بحرين, Baḥrain), officially the Kingdom of Bahrain (Arabic: مملكة البحرين, Mamlakat al-Baḥrayn), is a small island state near the western shores of the Persian Gulf. It is ruled by the Al Khalifa royal family. The population in 2010 stood at 1,234,571, including 666,172 non-nationals. Formerly an emirate, Bahrain was declared a kingdom in 2002.
Bahrain is an archipelago of 33 islands, the largest being Bahrain Island, at 55 km (34 mi) long by 18 km (11 mi) wide. Saudi Arabia lies to the west and is connected to Bahrain by the King Fahd Causeway. The peninsula of Qatar is to the southeast across the Gulf of Bahrain. The planned Qatar Bahrain Causeway will link Bahrain and Qatar and become the world's longest marine causeway.
Known for its oil and pearls, Bahrain is also home to many large structures, including the Bahrain World Trade Center and the Bahrain Financial Harbour, with a proposal in place to build the 1,022 m (3,353 ft) high Murjan Tower. The Qal'at al-Bahrain (the harbour and capital of the ancient land of Dilmun) was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005. The Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix takes place at the Bahrain International Circuit.
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Borsippa
Coordinates: 32°23′31.19″N 44°20′30.08″E / 32.3919972°N 44.3416889°E / 32.3919972; 44.3416889
Borsippa (Sumerian: BAD.SI.(A).AB.BAKI; Akkadian: Barsip and Til-Barsip) was an important ancient city of Sumer, built on both sides of a lake about 17.7 km (11.0 mi) southwest of Babylon on the east bank of the Euphrates. The site of Borsippa is in Babylon Province, Iraq and now called Birs Nimrud, identifying the site with Nimrod. The ziggurat, the "Tongue Tower," today one of the most vividly identifiable surviving ziggurats, is identified in the Talmud and Arab culture with the Tower of Babel.
The local god was Nabu, called the "son" of Babylon's Marduk, as would be appropriate for Babylon's lesser sister-city.
Borsippa is mentioned, usually in connection with Babylon, in texts from the Ur III period through the Seleucid period and even in early Islamic texts. Borsippa was dependent upon Babylon and was never the seat of a regional power. From the 9th century BCE, Borsippa was on the borderland south of which lay the tribal "houses" of Chaldea.
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Central Bank of Iraq
The Central Bank of Iraq (Arabic: البنك المركزي العراقي) is the central bank of Iraq.
The Central Bank of Iraq was established as Iraq's central bank by Central Bank of Iraq Law 2004 with authorised capital of 100 billion dinars. The current Governor of the Central Bank of Iraq is Sinan Al Shabibi.
The bank headquarters were designed by Danish architects Dissing+Weitling And completed in 1985. It is a cubical building constructed of reinforced concrete clad in marble. It has few exterior openings, and is instead organised around an inner courtyard which cuts through the heart of the structure and rises to a height of 40m. The courtyard is surrounded on all sides by offices separated by an interior glass curtain wall.
In August 2010, architect Zaha Hadid was appointed to design new headquarters for the Central Bank in Baghdad. Baghdad-born Zaha Hadid, was approached by the Iraqi authorities earlier that year; initial talks about the project were held in Istanbul on August 14, 2010 in the presence of Central Bank Governor Sinan Al-Shabibi.
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Dilbat
Coordinates: 32°09′N 44°30′E / 32.15°N 44.5°E / 32.15; 44.5
Dilbat (modern Tell ed-Duleim or Tell al-Deylam, Iraq) was an ancient Sumerian minor city located southeast from Babylon on the eastern bank of the Western Euphrates in modern day Al-Qādisiyyah, Iraq. The ziggurat E-ibe-Anu, dedicated to the goddess Urash, was located in the center of the city and was mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Dilbat was founded during the Sumerian Early Dynastic II period, around 2700 BC. It is known to have been occupied, at least, during the Akkadian, Old Babyonian, Kassite, Sasanian and Early Islamic periods. It was an early agricultural center cultivating einkorn wheat and producing reed products. It lay on the Arahtum canal.
The site of Tell al-Deylam consists or two mounds, a small western mound with 1st millennium BC and Early Islamic remains and a larger east mound, roughly 500 meters in circumference, with remains from the 1st to 3rd millennium BC. Dilbat was excavated briefly by Hormuzd Rassam, who recovered some cuneiform tablets at the site, mainly from the Neo-Babylonian period. The site was worked in 1989 by J. A. Armstrong of the Oriental Institute of Chicago. Though Dilbat itself has only been lightly excavated by archaeologists, numerous tablets from there have made their way to the antiquites market over the year as the result of unauthorized digging.
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Elam
Elam was an ancient civilization centered in the far west and southwest of modern-day Iran, stretching from the lowlands of what is now Khuzestan and Ilam Province, as well as a small part of southern Iraq. The modern name Elam is a transcription from Biblical Hebrew, corresponding to the Sumerian elam(a), the Akkadian elamtu, and the Elamite haltamti. Elamite states were among the leading political forces of the ancient near east. In classical literature, Elam was more often referred to as Susiana, a name derived from its capital, Susa.
Situated just to the east of Mesopotamia, Elam was part of the early urbanization during the Chalcolithic period (Copper Age). The emergence of written records from around 3000 BC also parallels Mesopotamian history where writing was used slightly earlier. In the Old Elamite period (Middle Bronze Age), Elam consisted of kingdoms on the Iranian plateau, centered in Anshan, and from the mid-2nd millennium BC, it was centered in Susa in the Khuzestan lowlands. Its culture played a crucial role in the Gutian Empire, especially during the Achaemenid dynasty that succeeded it, when the Elamite language remained among those in official use. Elamite is generally treated as an isolate language.
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Eridu
Coordinates: 30°48′57.02″N 45°59′45.85″E / 30.8158389°N 45.9960694°E / 30.8158389; 45.9960694
Eridu (Cuniform: NUN.KI 𒉣 𒆠; Sumerian: eriduki; Akkadian: irîtu) is an ancient Sumerian city in what is now Tell Abu Shahrain, Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq. Eridu was considered the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia, and is one of the oldest cities in the world. Located 12 km southwest of Ur, Eridu was the southernmost of a conglomeration of Sumerian cities that grew about temples, almost in sight of one another. In Sumerian mythology, Eridu was originally the home of Enki, who was considered to have founded the city, later known by the Akkadians as Ea. His temple was called E-Abzu, as Enki was believed to live in Abzu ("Deep Ocean"), an aquifer from which all life was believed to stem.
Eridu, also transliterated as Eridug, could mean "mighty place" or "guidance place". In the Sumerian king list, Eridu is named as the city of the first kings. The kinglist continues:
In Eridu, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28800 years. Alalngar ruled for 36000 years. 2 kings; they ruled for 64800 years. Then Eridu fell and the kingship was taken to Bad-tibira.
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Eshnunna
Coordinates: 33°45′N 44°45′E / 33.75°N 44.75°E / 33.75; 44.75 Eshnunna (modern Tell Asmar in Diyala Governorate, Iraq) was an ancient Sumerian city and city-state in central Mesopotamia. Although situated in the Diyala Valley north-east of Sumer proper, the city nonetheless belonged securely within the Sumerian cultural milieu.
The tutelary deity of the city was Tishpak (Tišpak).
Occupied from the Jemdet Nasr period about 3000 BCE, Eshnunna was a major city during the Early Dynastic period. Starting with the rise of the Akkadian Empire, Eshnunna oscillated between times of independence and domination by empires such as the Third Dynasty of Ur and Isin. Because of its control over lucrative trade routes, Eshnunna did function somewhat as a gateway between Mesopotamian and Elamite culture. The trade routes gave it access to many exotic sought-after goods such as horses from the north, copper, tin, and other metals and precious stones. In a grave, a pendant made of copal from Zanzibar was found.
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Geography of Iraq
The geography of Iraq is diverse and falls into four main regions: the desert (west of the Euphrates), Upper Mesopotamia (between the upper Tigris and Euphratesh rivers), the northern highlands of Iraqi Kurdistan, and Lower Mesopotamia, the alluvial plain extending from around Tikrit to the Persian Gulf.
The mountains in the northeast are an extension of the alpine system that runs eastward from the Balkans through southern Turkey, northern Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, eventually reaching the Himalayas. The desert is in the southwest and central provinces along the borders with Saudi Arabia and Jordan and geographically belongs with the Arabian Peninsula.
Iraq holds a special distinction in the history of geography: a clay tablet generally accepted as "the earliest known map" was unearthed in 1930 during the excavation of Ga-Sur at Nuzi Yorghan Tepe, near the towns of Harran and Kirkuk, 200 miles (322 km) north of the site of Babylon. The tablet, measuring 6.8 × 7.6 in (173 × 193 mm), is usually dated from the dynasty of Sargon of Akkad between 2500-2300 BC; an even earlier date for the tablet was promulgated by archeologist Leo Bagrow, placing it in the Agade Period (3800 BC).
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Girsu
Coordinates: 31°37′N 46°9′E / 31.617°N 46.15°E / 31.617; 46.15 Girsu (cuneiform:?; Sumerian:Ĝirsu; Akkadian:?) is modern Tell Telloh, Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq, and it was a city of ancient Sumer, situated some 25 km (16 mi) northwest of Lagash. Because of the initial nasal velar ŋ, the transcription of Ĝirsu is usually spelled as Ngirsu (also: G̃irsu, Girsu, Jirsu) to avoid confusion.
Girsu was possibly inhabited in the Ubaid period (5300-4800 BC), but significant levels of activity began in the Early Dynastic period (2900-2335 BC). At the time of Gudea, during the Second Dynasty of Lagash, Girsu became the capital of the Lagash kingdom and continued to be its religious center after political power had shifted to city of Lagash. During the Ur III period, Girsu was a major administrative center for the empire. After the fall of Ur, Girsu declined in importance, but remained inhabited until approximately 200 BC.
Telloh was the first Sumerian site to be extensively excavated, at first under the French vice-consul at Basra, Ernest de Sarzec, from 1877 to 1900, followed by his successor Gaston Cros from 1903–1909. Excavations continued under Abbé Henri de Genouillac in 1929–1931 and under André Parrot in 1931–1933. It was at Girsu that the fragments of the Stele of the Vultures were found. The site has suffered from poor excavation standards and also from illegal excavations. About 50,000 cuneiform tablets have been recovered from the site.
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Hamrin Mountains
The Hamrin Mountains (Arabic: جبل حمرين Jabāl Hamrīn, Kurdish: Çiyay Hemrîn) are a small mountain ridge in northeast Iraq. The westernmost ripple of the greater Zagros mountains; the Hamrin mountains extend from the Diyala Province bordering Iran, northwest to the Tigris river; crossing northern Salah ad Din Province and southern Kirkuk Province.
In antiquity, the mountains were part of the frontier region between Babylonia to the south and Assyria to the north. In medieval times, Babylonia and Assyria became linguistically Arabicized and Kurdicized respectively, and today the area forms part of the linguistic boundary between most of Arabic-speaking Iraq and Kurdish-speaking Iraq.
Coordinates: 35°01′57″N 43°38′47″E / 35.0325°N 43.6463889°E / 35.0325; 43.6463889
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Iran
Coordinates: 32°N 53°E / 32°N 53°E / 32; 53
Iran (i/ɪˈrɑːn/ or /aɪˈræn/;Persian: ایران [ʔiˈɾɒn] (
listen)), officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (Persian: جمهوری اسلامی ایران Jomhuri-ye Eslāmi-ye Irān), is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran", which in Persian means "Land of the Aryans", has been in use natively since the Sassanian era. It came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia ( /ˈpɜrʒə/ or /ˈpɜrʃə/). Both "Persia" and "Iran" are used interchangeably in cultural contexts; however, "Iran" is the name used officially in political contexts.
The 18th-largest country in the world in terms of area at 1,648,195 km2 (636,372 sq mi), Iran has a population of around 79 million. It is a country of particular geopolitical significance owing to its location in the Middle East and central Eurasia. Iran is bordered on the north by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. As Iran is a littoral state of the Caspian Sea, which is an inland sea, Kazakhstan and Russia are also Iran's direct neighbors to the north. Iran is bordered on the east by Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, on the west by Iraq and on the northwest by Turkey. Tehran is the capital, the country's largest city and the political, cultural, commercial and industrial center of the nation. Iran is a regional power, and holds an important position in international energy security and world economy as a result of its large reserves of petroleum and natural gas. Iran has the second largest proven natural gas reserves in the world and the fourth largest proven petroleum reserves.
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Iraq
Iraq (/ɪˈræk/ or
i/ɪˈrɑːk/; Arabic: العراق al-‘Irāq); officially the Republic of Iraq (Arabic: 
جمهورية العراق (help·info) Jumhūriyyat al-‘Irāq), is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert.
Iraq borders Syria to the northwest, Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, Jordan to the southwest and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to the south. Iraq has a narrow section of coastline measuring 58 km (36 mi) on the northern Persian Gulf. The capital city, Baghdad is in the center-east of the country.
Two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, run through the center of Iraq, flowing from northwest to southeast. These provide Iraq with agriculturally capable land and contrast with the steppe and desert landscape that covers most of Western Asia.
Historically, Iraq was the center of the Abbasid Arabic Islamic Empire. Iraq has been known to the west by the Greek toponym 'Mesopotamia' (Land between the rivers) and has been home to continuous successive civilizations since the 6th millennium BC. The region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is often referred to as the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of writing, law and the wheel. At different periods in its history, Iraq was the center of the indigenous Akkadian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Abbasid empires. It was also part of the Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Parthian, Sassanid, Roman, Rashidun, Umayyad, Mongol, Safavid, Afsharid, and Ottoman empires, and under British control as a League of Nations mandate.
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Iraqi Kurdistan
Iraqi Kurdistan or Kurdistan Region (Kurdish: ههرێمی کوردستان, Herêmî Kurdistan; Arabic: إقليم كردستان العراق Iqlīm Kurdistān al-‘Irāq) is an autonomous region of Iraq. It borders Iran to the east, Turkey to the north, Syria to the west and the rest of Iraq to the south. The regional capital is Arbil, known in Kurdish as Hewlêr. The region is officially governed by the Kurdistan Regional Government.
The establishment of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq dates back to the March 1970 autonomy agreement between the Kurdish opposition and the Iraqi government after years of heavy fighting. The Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s and the Anfal genocide campaign of the Iraqi army devastated the population and nature of Iraqi Kurdistan. Following the 1991 uprising of the Iraqi people against Saddam Hussein, many Kurds were forced to flee the country to become refugees in bordering regions of Iran and Turkey. A northern no-fly zone was established following the First Gulf War in 1991 to facilitate the return of Kurdish refugees. As Kurds continued to fight government troops, Iraqi forces finally left Kurdistan in October 1991, leaving the region to function de facto independently; however, neither of the two major Kurdish parties had at any time declared independence and Iraqi Kurdistan continues to view itself as an integral part of a united Iraq but one in which it administers its own affairs. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent political changes led to the ratification of a new Constitution of Iraq in 2005. The new Iraqi constitution defines Iraqi Kurdistan as a federal entity of Iraq, and establishes Arabic and Kurdish as Iraq's joint official languages.
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Isin
Coordinates: 31°56′N 45°17′E / 31.933°N 45.283°E / 31.933; 45.283
Isin (Sumerian: I3-si-inki) was an ancient city-state of lower Mesopotamia about 20 miles south of Nippur at the site of modern Ishan al-Bahriyat in Iraq's Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate.
The city lay on the Isinnitum Canal, part of a set of waterways that connected the cities of Mesopotamia. The patron deity of Isin was Nintinuga (Gula) goddess of healing, and a temple to her was built there. The Isin king Enlil-bani reported building a temple to Gula named E-ni-dub-bi, a temple for Sud named E-dim-gal-an-na, a temple E-ur-gi-ra to Ninisina, as well as a temple for the god Ninbgal.
The site of Isin was occupied at least as early as the Early Dynastic Period in the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, and possibly as far back as the Ubaid period. While cuneiform tablets from that time were found, the first epigraphic reference to Isin was not until the Ur III period.
When the deteriorating Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur-III) finally collapsed at the hands of the Elamites at the end of the third millennium BC, a power vacuum was left that other city-states scrambled to fill. The last king of the Ur Dynasty, Ibbi-Sin, had not the resources nor the organized government needed to expel the Elamite invaders. One of his governmental officials, Ishbi-Erra, relocated from Ur to Isin, another city in the south of Mesopotamia, and established himself as a ruler there. One of Ishbi-Erra's year names reports his defeating Ibbi-Sin in battle.
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Israel
Coordinates: 31°N 35°E / 31°N 35°E / 31; 35
Israel, officially the State of Israel ( /ˈɪzriːəl/ or /ˈɪzreɪəl/; Hebrew: מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, Medīnat Yisrā'el, IPA: [me̞diˈnät jisʁäˈʔe̞l] ( listen); Arabic: دَوْلَة إِسْرَائِيل, Dawlat Isrāʼīl, IPA: [dawlat ʔisraːˈʔiːl]), is a parliamentary republic in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan and the West Bank in the east, Egypt and the Gaza Strip on the southwest, and the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea to the south, and it contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area. Israel is defined as a Jewish and Democratic State in its Basic Laws and is the world's only Jewish-majority state.
Following the adoption of a resolution by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 29 November 1947 recommending the adoption and implementation of the United Nations plan to partition Palestine, on 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization and president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, a state independent from the British Mandate for Palestine. Neighboring Arab states invaded the next day in support of the Palestinian Arabs. Israel has since fought several wars with neighboring Arab states, in the course of which it has occupied the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Portions of these territories, including east Jerusalem, have been annexed by Israel, but the border with the neighboring West Bank has not yet been permanently defined.[neutrality is disputed] Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have so far not resulted in peace.
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Jemdet Nasr period
The Jemdet Nasr period is an archaeological culture in southern Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) that is generally dated to 3100–2900 BCE. It is named after the type-site Jemdet Nasr, where the assemblage typical for this period was first recognized. Its geographical distribution is limited to south–central Iraq. The culture of the proto-historical Jemdet Nasr period is a local development out of the preceding Uruk period and continues into the Early Dynastic I period.
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Kisurra
Kisurra (modern Tell Abu Hatab, Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate, Iraq) was an ancient Sumerian city situated on the west bank of the Euphrates, 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) north of Shuruppak. The cities name has been described as meaning the "place of spinning" and also as "boundary-ditch".[by whom?] Kisurra's main deity was Ninurta. Later, Ishara's main Mesopotamian cult centre was at Kisurra, although she is also thought to have been worshipped across a wide area amongst Syrians, Canaanites, and Hittites.
Kisurra was established ca. 2700 BC, during the Sumerian Early Dynastic II period. The southern end of the Isinnitum Canal was joined back into the Euphrates at Kisurra. The city lasted as a center for commerce and transport through the Akkadian and part of the Babylonian Empires, until cuneiform texts and excavation show a decline during the time of Hammurabi (c.1800 BCE).
German archaeologists, beginning with Robert Koldewey in 1902, have found many cuneiform tablets from Tell Abu Hatab.
Cities of the Ancient Near East
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Kutha
Coordinates: 32°45′36.1″N 44°36′46.3″E / 32.760028°N 44.612861°E / 32.760028; 44.612861
Kutha, Cuthah, or Cutha (Sumerian: Gudua, modern Tell Ibrahim, Babil Governorate, Iraq) was an ancient city of Sumer on the right bank of the eastern branch of the Upper Euphrates, north of Nippur and around 25 miles northeast of Babylon. It should not be confused with the site Tell Ibrahim Awad in Egypt.
According to the Tanakh, Cuthah was one of the five Syrian and Mesopotamian cities from which Sargon II, King of Assyria, brought settlers to take the places of the exiled Israelites (2 Kings 17:24-30). II Kings relates that these settlers were attacked by lions, and interpreting this to mean that their worship was not acceptable to the deity of the land, they asked Sargon to send someone to teach them, which he did.
The result was a mixture of religions and peoples, the latter being known as "Cuthim" in Hebrew and as "Samaritans" to the Greeks.
Kutha is also the name of the capital of the Sumerian underworld, Irkalla
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Lagash
Coordinates: 31°24′41″N 46°24′26″E / 31.41139°N 46.40722°E / 31.41139; 46.40722
Lagash (Sumerian: Lagaški; cuneiform logogram: 𒉢𒁓𒆷𒆠, [NU11.BUR].LAKI or [ŠIR.BUR].LAKI, "storehouse;"Akkadian: Nakamtu; modern Tell al-Hiba, Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq) is located northwest of the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and east of Uruk, about 22 kilometres (14 mi) east of the modern town of Ash Shatrah. Lagash was one of the oldest cities of the Ancient Near East. The ancient site of Surghul/Nina is around 6 miles (9.7 km) away. Nearby Girsu, about 25 km (16 mi) northwest of Al-Hiba, was the religious center of the Lagash state. Lagash's temple was E-Ninnu, dedicated to the god Ningirsu.
From inscriptions found at Girsu such as the Gudea cylinders, it appears that Lagash was an important Sumerian city in the late 3rd millennium BC. It was at that time ruled by independent kings, Ur-Nanshe (24th century BC) and his successors, who were engaged in contests with the Elamites on the east and the kings of "Kienĝir" and Kish on the north. Some of the earlier works from before the Akkadian conquest are also extremely interesting, in particular Eannatum's Stele of the Vultures and Entemena's great silver vase ornamented with Ningirsu's sacred animal Anzu: a lion-headed eagle with wings outspread, grasping a lion in each talon. With the Akkadian conquest Lagash lost its independence, its ruler or ensi becoming a vassal of Sargon of Akkad and his successors; but Lagash continued to be a city of much importance and above all, a centre of artistic development.
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Larsa
Coordinates: 31°17′9″N 45°51′13″E / 31.28583°N 45.85361°E / 31.28583; 45.85361
Larsa (Sumerian logogram: UD.UNUGKI, read Larsamki) was an important city of ancient Sumer, the center of the cult of the sun god Utu. It lies some 25 km southeast of Uruk in Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate, near the east bank of the Shatt-en-Nil canal at the site of the modern settlement Tell as-Senkereh or Sankarah.
According to the Sumerian king list, "Larag" (Sumerian: LA-RA-AKKI) was one of the five cities to "exercise kingship" in the legendary antediluvian era. The historical "Larsa" was already in existence as early as the reign of Eannatum of Lagash, who annexed it to his empire.
The city became a political force during the Isin-Larsa period. After the Third Dynasty of Ur collapsed ca. 1940 BC, Ishbi-Erra, an official of Ibbi-Sin, the last king of the Ur III Dynasty, relocated to Isin and set up a government which purported to be the successor to the Ur III dynasty. From there, Ishbi-Erra recaptured Ur as well as the cities of Uruk and Lagash, which Larsa was subject to. Subsequent Isin rulers appointed governors to rule over Lagash; one such governor was an Amorite named Gungunum. He eventually broke with Isin and established an independent dynasty in Larsa. To legitimize his rule and deliver a blow to Isin, Gungunum captured the city of Ur. As the region of Larsa was the main center of trade via the Persian Gulf, Isin lost an enormously profitable trade route, as well as a city with much cultic significance.
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Lebanon
Lebanon (i/ˈlɛbənɒn/ or /ˈlɛbənən/; Arabic: لبنان Libnān or Lubnān, Lebanese Arabic: [lɪbˈneːn]), officially the Lebanese Republic (Arabic: الجمهورية اللبنانية al-Jumhūrīyah al-Libnānīyah, Lebanese Arabic: [elˈʒʊmhuːɾɪjje l.ˈlɪbneːnɪjje]), is a country in the East Mediterranean. It is bordered by Syria to the north and east, and Israel to the south. Lebanon's location at the crossroads of the Mediterranean Basin and the Arabian hinterland has dictated its rich history, and shaped a cultural identity of religious and ethnic diversity.
The earliest evidence of civilization in Lebanon dates back more than 7,000 years—predating recorded history. Lebanon was the home of the Phoenicians, a maritime culture that flourished for nearly 2,500 years (3000–539 BC). Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the five provinces that comprise modern Lebanon were mandated to France. The French expanded the borders of Mount Lebanon, which was mostly populated by Maronite Catholics and Druze, to include more Muslims. Lebanon gained independence in 1943, and established a unique political system, known as confessionalism, a power-sharing mechanism based on religious communities – Bechara El Khoury who became independent Lebanon's first President and Riad El-Solh, who became Lebanon's first prime minister, are considered the founders of the modern Republic of Lebanon and are national heroes for having led the country's independence. French troops withdrew from Lebanon in 1946.
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Marad
Coordinates: 32°04′N 44°47′E / 32.067°N 44.783°E / 32.067; 44.783 (Marad)
Marad (Sumerian: Marda, modern Tell Wannat es-Sadum or Tell as-Sadoum, Iraq) was an ancient Sumerian city. Marad was situated on the west bank of the then western branch of the Upper Euphrates River west of Nippur in modern day Iraq and roughly 50 km southeast of Kish, on the Arahtu River.
The city's ziggurat E-igi-kalama was dedicated to Ninurta the god of earth and the plow, built by one of Naram-Sin's sons, as well as the tutelary deity Lugalmarada (also Lugal-Amarda). The city fell into the bounds of the Akkadian empire after the conquest of Sargon of Akkad.
Marad was established ca. 2700 BC, during the Sumerian Early Dynastic II period.
The site of Marad covers an area of less than 124 hectares (500 acres).
Marad was excavated by a team from Qādisiyyah University in 1990 led by Naal Hannoon, and in 2005 and 2007 led by Abbas Al-Hussainy. Publication of the last two seasons is in progress.
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Medes
The Medes (/midz/) (from Old Persian Māda-) were an ancient Iranian people who lived in Iran in an area known as Media and spoke a northwestern Iranian language referred to as the Median language. Their arrival to the region is associated with the first wave of Iranian tribes in the late second millennium BCE (the Bronze Age collapse) through the beginning of the first millennium BCE.
In the 7th century BCE a unified Median state was formed which together with Babylonia, Lydia, and Egypt became one of the four major powers of the ancient Near East. An alliance with the Babylonians helped the Medes to capture Nineveh in 612 BCE which resulted in the collapse of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The Medes were subsequently able to establish their Median kingdom (with Ecbatana as their royal centre) beyond their original homeland (central-western Iran) and had eventually a territory stretching roughly from northeastern Iran to the Halys River in Anatolia. The Median kingdom was conquered in 550 BCE by Cyrus the Great who established the next Iranian dynasty—the Achaemenid Empire.
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Mesopotamian Marshes
The Mesopotamian Marshes are a wetland area located in southern Iraq and partially in southwestern Iran. Historically the marshlands, mainly composed of the separate but adjacent Central, Hawizeh and Hammar Marshes, used to be the largest wetland ecosystem of Western Eurasia. It is a rare aquatic landscape in the desert, providing habitat for the Marsh Arabs and important populations of wildlife. Draining of portions of the marshes began in the 1950s and continued through the 1970s to reclaim land for agriculture and oil exploration. However, in the late 1980s and 1990s, during the presidency of Saddam Hussein, this work was expanded and accelerated to evict Shia Muslims from the marshes. Before 2003, the marshes were drained to 10% of their original size. After the fall of Saddam's regime in 2003, the marshes have partially recovered but drought along with upstream dam construction and operation in Turkey, Syria and Iran have hindered the process.
In the 4th millennium BC the first literate societies emerged in Southern Mesopotamia, often referred to as the Cradle of Civilization, and the first cities and complex state bureaucracies were developed there during the Uruk period. Due to the geographical location and the ecological factors of the Fertile Crescent, a crescent-shape fertile area running from the basins of the Nile in Egypt, northwards along the Mediterranean coast in Palestine and Israel, and southwards again along the Euphrates and the Tigris towards the Persian Gulf, civilizations were able to develop agricultural and technological programmes. The crucial trigger was the availability of wild edible plant species. Farming arose early in the Fertile Crescent because the area had a great quantity of wild wheat and pulse species that were nutritious and easy to domesticate.
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Mozambique
Mozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique (Portuguese: Moçambique or República de Moçambique, pronounced: [ʁɛˈpublikɐ di musɐ̃ˈbiki]), is a country in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west and Swaziland and South Africa to the southwest. The capital city is Maputo, formerly known as Lourenço Marques.
Between the 1st and 5th centuries AD, Bantu-speaking peoples migrated from farther north and west. Swahili, and later also Arab, commercial ports existed along the coasts until the arrival of Europeans. The area was explored by Vasco da Gama in 1498 and colonized by Portugal in 1505. Mozambique became independent in 1975, and became the People's Republic of Mozambique shortly thereafter. It was the scene of an intense civil war lasting from 1977 to 1992.
Mozambique is endowed with rich and extensive natural resources. The country's economy is based largely on agriculture, but with industry, mainly food and beverages, chemical manufacturing, aluminium and petroleum production, is growing fast. The country's tourism sector is also growing. South Africa is Mozambique's main trading partner and source of foreign direct investment. Portugal, Spain, and Belgium are also among the country's most important partners. Since 2001 Mozambique is one of the world's top ten for annual average GDP growth. However, Mozambique still has one of the lowest GDP per capita, one of the worst human development index and one of the highest inequality in the world, as well as having the world's lowest life expectancy.
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Nasiriyah
Nasiriyah (Arabic: الناصرية; BGN: An Nāşirīyah; also spelled Nassiriya or Nasiriya) is a city in Iraq. It is on the Euphrates about 225 miles (370 km) southeast of Baghdad, near the ruins of the ancient city of Ur. It is the capital of the province of Dhi Qar. According to the 1987 census the city had a population of 265,937 people; the estimated population in 2003 was 560,200.
The population of Nasiriyah is nearly exclusively[clarification needed]Shī‘a Muslims with small Mandaean and Sunni muslim communities, until 1951 the town was a home to a sizable Jewish community. After the failed uprising of 1991, many families were massacred by Saddam Hussein's forces whilst thousands fled from Iraq to other countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Sweden.
Nasiriyah is the centre of a date-growing area, but many other agricultural products are produced here as well. The city's industries include boatbuilding, carpentry and silver working.
The old parts of the town are built mainly from sun-dried brick and this part of the town is still enclosed by a mud wall. The newer parts are dominated by standard Iraqi block buildings.
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Nippur
Coordinates: 32°7′37″N 45°13′51″E / 32.12694°N 45.23083°E / 32.12694; 45.23083
Nippur (Sumerian: Nibru, often logographically recorded as 𒂗𒆤𒆠, EN.LÍLKI, "Enlil City;"Akkadian: Nibbur) was one of the most ancient of all the Sumerian cities.[citation needed] It was the special seat of the worship of the Sumerian god Enlil, the "Lord Wind," ruler of the cosmos subject to An alone. Nippur was located in modern Nuffar in Afak, Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate, Iraq.
Nippur never enjoyed political hegemony in its own right, but its control was crucial, as it was considered capable of conferring the overall "kingship" on monarchs from other city-states. It was distinctively a sacred city, important from the possession of the famous shrine of Enlil.
According to the Tummal Chronicle, Enmebaragesi, an early ruler of Kish, was the first to build up this temple. His influence over Nippur has also been detected archaeologically. The Chronicle lists successive early Sumerian rulers who kept up intermittent ceremonies at the temple: Aga of Kish, son of Enmebaragesi; Mesannepada of Ur; his son Meskiang-nunna; Gilgamesh of Uruk; his son Ur-Nungal; Nanni of Ur and his son Meskiang-nanna. It also indicates that the practice was revived in Neo-Sumerian times by Ur-Nammu of Ur, and continued until Ibbi-Sin appointed Enmegalana high priest in Uruk (ca. 1950 BC).
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Parthian Empire
The Parthian (pronounced /ˈpɑrθiən/) Empire (247 BC – 224 AD), also known as the Arsacid (/ˈɑrsəsɪd/) Empire (Modern Persian: اشکانیان Ashkāniān), was a major Iranian political and cultural power in ancient Persia. Its latter name comes from Arsaces I of Parthia who, as leader of the Parni tribe, founded it in the mid-3rd century BC when he conquered the Parthia region in Iran's northeast, then a satrapy (province) in rebellion against the Seleucid Empire. Mithridates I of Parthia (r. c. 171–138 BC) greatly expanded the empire by seizing Media and Mesopotamia from the Seleucids. At its height, the Parthian Empire stretched from the northern reaches of the Euphrates, in what is now south-eastern Turkey, to eastern Iran. The empire, located on the Silk Road trade route between the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean Basin and Han Empire of China, became a center of trade and commerce.
The Parthians largely adopted the art, architecture, religious beliefs, and royal insignia of their culturally heterogeneous empire, which encompassed Persian, Hellenistic, and regional cultures. For about the first half of its existence, the Arsacid court adopted elements of Greek culture, though it eventually saw a gradual revival of Iranian traditions. The Arsacid rulers were titled the "King of Kings", as a claim to be the heirs to the Achaemenid Empire; indeed, they accepted many local kings as vassals where the Achaemenids would have had centrally appointed, albeit largely autonomous, satraps. The court did appoint a small number of satraps, largely outside Iran, but these satrapies were smaller and less powerful than the Achaemenid potentates. With the expansion of Arsacid power, the seat of central government shifted from Nisa, Turkmenistan to Ctesiphon along the Tigris (south of modern Baghdad, Iraq), although several other sites also served as capitals.
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Persian Gulf
The Persian Gulf is located in Western Asia between Iran (Persia) and the Arabian Peninsula. It is an extension of the Indian Ocean.
The Persian Gulf was the focus of the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War, in which each side attacked the other's oil tankers. In 1991, the Persian Gulf again was the background for what was called the "Persian Gulf War" or the "Gulf War" when Iraq invaded Kuwait and was subsequently pushed back, despite the fact that this conflict was primarily a land conflict.
The Persian Gulf has many good fishing grounds, extensive coral reefs, and abundant pearl oysters, but its ecology has come under pressure from industrialization, and in particular, oil and petroleum spillages during wars in the region.
Historically and internationally known as the Persian Gulf, this body of water is sometimes controversially referred to as the Arabian Gulf or simply The Gulf by most Arab states, although neither of the latter two terms are recognized internationally. The name Gulf of Iran (Persian Gulf) is used by the International Hydrographic Organization.
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Samarra
Sāmarrā (Arabic: سامَرّاء) is a city in Iraq. It stands on the east bank of the Tigris in the Salah ad-Din Governorate, 125 kilometers (78 mi) north of Baghdad and, in 2003, had an estimated population of 348,700.
Medieval Islamic writers believed that the name “Samarra” is derived from the Arabic phrase “Sarra man ra’a” (Arabic: سر من رأى), which translates to “A joy for all who see”. Later when the city declined the name changed to “Sa'a man ra’a” (Arabic: ساء من رأى), which translates to “A sadness for all who see”. Eventually the two names merged to its current form Samarra' (Arabic: سامَرّاء).
In 2007, UNESCO named Samarra one of its World Heritage Sites.
The remains of ancient Samarra were first excavated between 1911 and 1914 by the German Archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld. Since 1946, the notebooks, letters, unpublished excavation reports and photographs have been in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Though the present archaeological site covered by mudbrick ruins is vast, the site of Samarra was only lightly occupied in ancient times, apart from the Chalcolithic Samarran Culture (ca 5500–4800 BC) identified at the rich site of Tell Sawwan, where evidence of irrigation—including flax— establishes the presence of a prosperous settled culture with a highly organized social structure. The culture is primarily known by its finely-made pottery decorated against dark-fired backgrounds with stylized figures of animals and birds and geometric designs. This widely-exported type of pottery, one of the first widespread, relatively uniform pottery styles in the Ancient Near East, was first recognized at Samarra. The Samarran Culture was the precursor to the Mesopotamian culture of the Ubaid period.
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Shuruppak
Coordinates: 31°46′38.51″N 45°30′35.14″E / 31.7773639°N 45.5097611°E / 31.7773639; 45.5097611 Shuruppak or Shuruppag (Sumerian: "The Healing Place") was an ancient Sumerian city situated about 35 miles south of Nippur on the banks of the Euphrates at the site of modern Tell Fara in Iraq's Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate.
Shuruppak was dedicated to Ninlil, also called Sud, the goddess of grain and the air.
Shuruppak became a grain storage and distribution city and had more silos than any other Sumerian city. The earliest excavated levels at Shuruppak date to the Jemdet Nasr period about 3000 BCE; it was abandoned shortly after 2000 BCE. Erich Schmidt found one Isin-Larsa cylinder seal and several pottery plaques which may date to early in the second millennium BC. Surface finds are predominantly Early Dynastic.
At the end of the Uruk period there was an archaeologically attested river flood in Shuruppak. Polychrome pottery from a destruction level below the flood deposit has been dated to the Jemdet Nasr period that immediately preceded the Early Dynastic I period.
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Sippar
Coordinates: 33°03′32″N 44°15′08″E / 33.058829°N 44.252153°E / 33.058829; 44.252153 (Sippar)
Sippar (Sumerian: Zimbir) was an ancient Near Eastern city on the east bank of the Euphrates river, located at the site of modern Tell Abu Habbah in Iraq's Babil Governorate, some 60 km north of Babylon and 30 km southeast of Baghdad.
Given that thousands of cuneiform tablets have been recovered at the site, relatively little is known about the history of Sippar. As was often the case in Mesopotamia, it was part of a pair of cities, separated by a river. Sippar was on the east side of the Euphrates, while its sister city, Sippar-Amnanum, was on the west.
While pottery finds indicate that the site of Sippar was in use as early as the Uruk period, substantial occupation occurred only in the Early Dynastic period of the 3rd millennium BC, the Old Babylonian period of the 2nd millennium BC, and the Neo-Babylonian time of the 1st millennium BC. Lesser levels of use continued into the time of the Achaemenid, Seleucid and Parthian Empires.
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Syria
Syria (/ˈsɪriə/ ( listen) SIRR-ee-ə; Arabic: سورية Sūriyya or سوريا Sūryā; Syriac: ܣܘܪܝܐ; Kurdish: Sûrî), officially the Syrian Arab Republic (Arabic: الجمهورية العربية السورية al-Jumhūriyyah al-‘Arabīyah as-Sūriyyah Arabic pronunciation (help·info)), is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest.
In English, the name Syria was formerly synonymous with the Levant, known in Arabic as Sham, while the modern state encompasses the sites of several ancient kingdoms and empires, including the Eblan civilization of the third millennium BC. In the Islamic era, its capital city, Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, was the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate, and a provincial capital of the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt.
The population of Syria is 74% Sunni, 12% Alawi, 10% Christian, and 3% Druze. Combined, 87% of the Syrian population is Muslim, while the other 10% is Christian, which includes mainly Arab Christians but also Assyrians and Armenians. Major ethnic minorities in Syria include Kurds (9%), Assyrians, Armenians, Turkmens and Circassians. The majority of the population is Arab (90%).
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Syrian Desert
The Syrian Desert (Arabic: بادية الشام, bādiyat ash-shām), also known as the Syro-Arabian desert is a combination of steppe and true desert that is located in the northern Arabian Peninsula covering 200,000 square miles (over 500,000 square kilometers). The desert is very rocky and flat.
The Syrian desert is part of the Al-Hamad, which covers portions of Syria, Iraq, Jordan,and Saudi Arabia. Its border on the west is the Orontes Valley, and its border on the east is the Euphrates. In the north, the desert gives way to the more fertile areas of grass. In the south, it runs into the deserts of the southern Arabian Peninsula. Many mini-deserts exist in the Syrian Desert such as Palmyra. Damascus is located on an oasis. The desert's remarkable landscape was formed by lava flows from the volcanic region of the Jebel Druze in southern Syria. The Syrian Desert is the origin of the Syrian hamster.
The desert was historically inhabited by bedouin tribes, and many tribes still remain in the region, their members living mainly in towns and settlements built near oases. Some bedouin still maintain their traditional way of life in the desert. Safaitic inscriptions, proto-Arabic texts written by literate bedouin, are found throughout the Syrian Desert. These date approximately from the 1st century B.C. to the 4th century A.D.
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Tell Brak
Tell Brak, ancient Nagar, is a tell, or settlement mound, in the Upper Khabur area in Al-Hasakah Governorate, northeastern Syria. The site was occupied between the sixth and second millennia BCE. At 40 metres (130 ft) in height, and an area of approximately 130 hectares (320 acres), it is one of the largest archaeological sites in northern Mesopotamia.
Tell Brak was excavated by the British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan in 1937 and 1938. A team from the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London and later from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research of the University of Cambridge led by David and Joan Oates worked there for 14 seasons between 1976 and 1993. Following the Oates' team, the field director of the dig was Roger Matthews. In 1998, Geoff Emberling, who had dug with the Matthews team became co-field director (1998–2004) with Helen McDonald, the longtime registrar and draftsperson at Brak. This effort was co-sponsored by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Augusta McMahon, of the University of Cambridge, took over as field director in the spring of 2006. A regional archaeological field survey in a 20 km (12 mi) radius around Brak was supervised by Henry T. Wright of the University of Michigan (2002–2005). The finds from the excavations at Tell Brak are on display in the Deir ez-Zor Museum.
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Tigris
The Tigris River (/ˈtaɪɡrɪs/; Arabic: دجله) is the eastern member of the two great rivers that define Mesopotamia, the other being the Euphrates. The river flows south from the mountains of southeastern Turkey through Iraq.
The Tigris is 1,850 km long, rising in the Taurus Mountains of eastern Turkey about 25 km southeast of the city of Elazig and about 30 km from the headwaters of the Euphrates. The river then flows for 400 km through Turkish territory before becoming the border between Syria and Turkey. This stretch of 44 km is the only part of the river that is located in Syria. The remaining 1,418 km are entirely within the Iraqi borders.
The Tigris unites with the Euphrates near Basra, and from this junction to the Persian Gulf the mass of moving water is known as the Shatt-al-Arab. According to Pliny and other ancient historians, the Euphrates originally had its outlet into the sea separate from that of the Tigris.
Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, stands on the banks of the Tigris. The port city of Basra straddles the Shatt al-Arab. In ancient times, many of the great cities of Mesopotamia stood on or near the Tigris, drawing water from it to irrigate the civilization of the Sumerians. Notable Tigris-side cities included Nineveh, Ctesiphon, and Seleucia, while the city of Lagash was irrigated by the Tigris via a canal dug around 2400 BC.
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Turkey
Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye), known officially as the Republic of Turkey ( Türkiye Cumhuriyeti (help·info)), is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia (mostly in the Anatolian peninsula) and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe. Turkey is bordered by eight countries: Bulgaria to the northwest; Greece to the west; Georgia to the northeast; Armenia, Azerbaijan (the exclave of Nakhchivan) and Iran to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the southeast. The Mediterranean Sea and Cyprus are to the south; the Aegean Sea is to the west; and the Black Sea is to the north. The Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles (which together form the Turkish Straits) demarcate the boundary between East Thrace and Anatolia; they also separate Europe and Asia.
Turkey is one of the six independent Turkic states. The vast majority of the population are Muslims. The country's official language is Turkish, whereas Kurdish and Zazaki languages are spoken by Kurds and Zazas, who constitute 18% of the population.
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Umm Qasr
Umm Qasr (Arabic: أم قصر, also transliterated as : Um-qasir, Um-qasser), is a port city in southern Iraq. It stands on the canalised Khawr az-Zubayr, part of the Khawr Abd Allah estuary which leads to the Persian Gulf. It is separated from the border of Kuwait by a small inlet. A bridge across the waterway linked the port with Kuwait prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Umm Qasr was originally a small fishing town, but was used as a military port on several occasions before advancing trades and jobs by building a deep-water port on the coast. It was said to have been the site of Alexander the Great's landing in Mesopotamia in 325 BC. During the Second World War a temporary port was established there by the Allies to unload supplies to dispatch to the Soviet Union. It fell back into obscurity after the war, but the government of King Faisal II sought to establish a permanent port there in the 1950s.
After the Iraqi Revolution of 1958, a naval base was established at Umm Qasr. The port was subsequently founded in 1961 by the Iraqi ruler General Abdul-Karim Qassem. It was intended to serve as Iraq's only "deep water" port, reducing the country's dependence on the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway that marks the border with Iran. The port facilities were built by a consortium of companies from West Germany, Sweden and Lebanon, with a railway line connecting it to Basra and Baghdad. The port opened for business in July 1967.
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Umma
Coordinates: 31°38′N 45°52′E / 31.633°N 45.867°E / 31.633; 45.867
Umma (modern Tell Jokha, Dhi Qar Governorate in Iraq) was an ancient city in Sumer. There is some scholarly debate about the Sumerian and Akkadian names for this site.
In the early Sumerian text Inanna's descent to the netherworld, Inanna dissuades demons from the netherworld from taking Shara, patron of Umma, who was living in squalor. They eventually take Dumuzid king of Uruk instead, who lived in palatial opulence.
Best known for its long frontier conflict with Lagash, the city reached its zenith ca. 2275 BC, under the rule of Lugal-Zage-Si, who also controlled Ur and Uruk. Under the Ur III dynasty, Umma became an important provincial center. Most of the over 30,000 cuneiform tablets recovered from the site are administrative and economic texts from that time. They permit an excellent insight into provincial affairs in Umma. The Umma calendar of Shulgi (ca. 21st century BC) is the immediate predecessor of the later Babylonian calendar, and indirectly of the post-exilic Hebrew calendar.
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Ur
Coordinates: 30°57′45″N 46°06′11″E / 30.9625°N 46.10306°E / 30.9625; 46.10306 Ur (Sumerian: Urim;Sumerian Cuneiform: 𒋀𒀕𒆠 URIM2KI or 𒋀𒀊𒆠 URIM5KI;Akkadian: Uru) was an important city-state in ancient Sumer located at the site of modern Tell el-Muqayyar in Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate. Once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf, Ur is now well inland, south of the Euphrates on its right bank, 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Nasiriyah.
The city's patron deity was Nanna, the Sumerian moon god, and the name of the city is in origin derived from the god's name, URIM2KI being the classical Sumerian spelling of LAK-32.UNUGKI, literally "the abode (UNUG) of Nanna (LAK-32)".
The site is marked by the ruins of the Ziggurat of Ur, which contained the shrine of Nanna, excavated in the 1930s. The temple was built in the 21st century BC (short chronology), during the reign of Ur-Nammu and was reconstructed in the 6th century BC by Nabonidus. The ruins cover an area of 1,200 metres (3,900 ft) northwest to southeast by 800 metres (2,600 ft) northeast to southwest and rise up to about 20 metres (66 ft) above the present plain level.
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Uruk
Coordinates: 31°19′20″N 45°38′10″E / 31.32222°N 45.63611°E / 31.32222; 45.63611 Uruk (Cuneiform: 𒌷𒀔,URU UNUG; Sumerian: Unug; Akkadian: Uruk; Aramaic: Erech; Hebrew: Erech; Greek: Ὀρχόη Orchoē, Ὠρύγεια Ōrugeia; Arabic: وركاء, Warkā') was an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates river, on the ancient dry former channel of the Euphrates River, some 30 km east of modern As-Samawah, Al-Muthannā, Iraq.
Uruk gave its name to the Uruk period, the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period in the history of Mesopotamia spanning c. 4000 to 3100 BC, succeeded by the Jemdet Nasr period of Sumer proper. Uruk played a leading role in the early urbanization of Sumer in the mid 4th millennium BC. At its height c 2900 BC, Uruk probably had 50,000–80,000 residents living in 6 km2 of walled area; making it the largest city in the world at the time. The semi-mythical king Gilgamesh, according to the chronology presented in the Sumerian king list, ruled Uruk in the 27th century BC. The city lost its prime importance around 2000 BC, in the context of the struggle of Babylonia with Elam, but it remained inhabited throughout the Seleucid and Parthian periods until it was finally abandoned shortly before or after the Islamic conquest.
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Zagros Mountains
The Zagros Mountains (Arabic: جبال زغروس, Aramaic: ܛܘܪ ܙܪܓܣ, Kurdish: زنجیرهچیاکانی زاگرۆس, Lurish: کو یه لی زاگروس, Persian: رشته كوه زاگرس) are the largest mountain range in Iran and Iraq. With a total length of 1,500 km (932 mi), from northwestern Iran, and roughly correlating with Iran's western border, the Zagros range spans the whole length of the western and southwestern Iranian plateau and ends at the Strait of Hormuz. The highest points in the Zagros Mountains are Zard Kuh-bakhtiari and Dena. The Hazaran massif in the Kerman province of Iran forms an eastern outlier of the range, the Jebal Barez reaching into Sistan.
The Zagros fold and thrust belt was formed by collision of two tectonic plates — the Eurasian and Arabian Plates. Recent GPS measurements in Iran have shown that this collision is still active and the resulting deformation is distributed non-uniformly in the country, mainly taken up in the major mountain belts like Alborz and Zagros. A relatively dense GPS network which covered the Zagros in the Iranian part also proves a high rate of deformation within the Zagros. The GPS results show that the current rate of shortening in SE Zagros is ~10 mm/yr and ~5mm/yr in the NW Zagros. The NS strike-slip Kazerun fault divides the Zagros into two distinct zones of deformation. The GPS results also show different shortening directions along the belt, i.e. normal shortening in the South-East and oblique shortening in the NW Zagros.
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Akkadians
Coordinates: 33°6′N 44°6′E / 33.1°N 44.1°E / 33.1; 44.1
The Akkadian Empire (Akkadian URUAkkad KI, Hittite KUR A.GA.DÈ.KI "land of Akkad"; Biblical Hebrew אַכַּד Akkad) was an empire centered in the city of Akkad (Sumerian: Agade) and its surrounding region in Mesopotamia.
During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism.Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC (the exact dating being a matter of debate).
The Akkadian Empire reached its political peak between the 24th and 22nd centuries BC, following the conquests of its founder Sargon of Akkad (2334–2279 BC). Under Sargon and his successors, Akkadian language was briefly imposed on neighboring conquered states such as Elam. Akkad is sometimes regarded as the first empire in history, though there are earlier Sumerian claimants.[citation needed]
The precise archaeological site of the city of Akkad has not yet been found.[citation needed] The form Agade appears in Sumerian, for example in the Sumerian King List; the later Assyro-Babylonian form Akkadû ("of or belonging to Akkad") was likely derived from this. The etymology and meaning of Akkad (written a.ga.dèKI or URIKI) are unknown. Centuries later, the neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus mentioned in his archaeological records that Ishtar's worship in Agade was later superseded by that of the goddess Anunit, whose shrine was at Sippar—suggesting proximity of Sippar and Agade. Despite numerous searches, the city has never been found. One theory holds that Agade was situated opposite Sippar on the left bank of the Euphrates, and was perhaps the oldest part of the city of Sippar. Another theory is that the ruins of Akkad are to be found beneath modern Baghdad. Reputedly it was destroyed by invading Gutians with the fall of the Akkadian Empire.
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Alulim
Alulim was the first king of Eridu, and the first king of Sumer, according to the Sumerian King List, presumably making him the first recorded king in the world. Enki, the god of Eridu, or his mortal son Adapa, are said to have brought civilization to Sumer at this point, or just shortly before.
The Sumerian King List has the following entry for Alulim:
"After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridug (Eridu). In Eridug, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28800 years."
In a chart of antediluvian generations in Babylonian and Biblical traditions, Professor William Wolfgang Hallo associates Alulim with the composite half-man, half-fish counselor or culture hero (Apkallu) Uanna-Adapa (Oannes), and suggests an equivalence between Alulim and Enosh in the Sethite Genealogy given in Genesis chapter 5. Hallo notes that Alulim's name means "Stag".
Shea poses historical Alulim (king of Eridu which may be biblical Eden) may be the same man as the biblical Adam.
Hess elaborates there are three different ways the Hebrew word "adam" is used in Genesis. "Adam" can just mean the generic term for mankind in general, a male in particular, or as a title; as is seen in ancient Near Eastern parallels where the lu-sign for ruler means "man". The Sumerian and the Hebrew Adam are similar in usage; Both can mean humans or humanity. As a general rule in the Hebrew, when Adam has a definite article, it means man or human; while Adam with no article is a personal name (Hamilton 1990, 159).
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Archibald Sayce
The Rev. Archibald Henry Sayce (25 September 1846 - 4 February 1933), was a pioneer British Assyriologist and linguist, who held a chair as Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919.
Archibald Sayce was born in Shirehampton, Bristol, to a family of Shropshire descent. A delicate child who suffered from tuberculosis and got a late start, he soon caught up with a private tutor and was reading Homer in Greek at ten. He attended The Queen's College, Oxford, becoming a fellow in 1869.
In 1874 Sayce published a long paper, "The Astronomy and Astrology of the Babylonians" in Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology vol. 3, part 1), with transcriptions and translations of the relevant cuneiform texts, that was one of the first articles to recognise and translate astronomical cuneiform texts.
In 1879 Rev. Sayce linked the reliefs near Magnesia on the Maeander in western Anatolia to those of the site at Yazilikaya in the Turkish plateau, and recognised that they belonged to an unidentified pre-Greek culture.
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Assyrian people
The Assyrian people, most commonly known as Assyrians and other later names, such as: Chaldeans, Syrians, Syriacs (see names of Syriac Christians), are a distinct ethnic group whose origins lie in ancient Mesopotamia. They are Eastern Aramaic speaking Semites who trace their ancestry back to the Sumero-Akkadian civilisation that emerged in Mesopotamia circa 4000- 3500 BC, and in particular to the northern region of the Akkadian lands, which would become known as Assyria by the 24th Century BC. The Assyrian nation existed as an independent state, and often a powerful empire, from the 24th century BC until the end of the 7th century BC.
Today that ancient territory is part of several nations; Assyria remained a Geo-political entity after its fall, and was ruled as an occupied province under the rule of various empires from the late 7th century BC until the mid 7th century AD when it was dissolved, and the Assyrian people have gradually become a minority in their homelands since that time. They are indigenous to, and have traditionally lived all over what is now Iraq, north east Syria, north west Iran, and Southeastern Turkey. They are predominantly Christian.
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Chaldea
Chaldea or Chaldaea ( /kælˈdiːə/), from Greek Χαλδαία, Chaldaia; Akkadian māt Kaldu; Hebrew כשדים, Kaśdim;Aramaic: ܟܐܠܕܘ, Kaldo) was a marshy land located in modern-day southern Iraq which came to rule Babylon briefly. Tribes of settlers who arrived in the region from the 8th Century BC became known as the Chaldeans or the Chaldees. The Hebrew Bible uses the term כשדים (Kaśdim) and this is translated as Chaldaeans in the Septuagint.
The short-lived 11th dynasty of the Kings of Babylon (6th century BC) is conventionally known to historians as the Chaldean Dynasty, although only the first four rulers of this dynasty were known to be Chaldeans, and the last ruler was known not to be. Their kingdom in the southern portion of Babylonia lay chiefly on the right bank of the Euphrates. Though the name came to be commonly used to refer to the whole of southern Mesopotamia, Chaldea proper was in fact the vast plain in the far south east formed by the deposits of the Euphrates and the Tigris, extending to about four hundred miles along the course of these rivers, and about a hundred miles in average width.
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Civilization
Civilization (or civilisation) is a sometimes controversial term that has been used in several related ways. Primarily, the term has been used to refer to the material and instrumental side of human cultures that are complex in terms of technology, science, and division of labor. Such civilizations are generally hierarchical and urbanized. In a classical context, people were called "civilized" to set them apart from barbarians, while in a modern-day context, "civilized peoples" have been contrasted with primitive peoples.
There is a tendency to use the term in a less strict way, to mean approximately the same thing as "culture" and therefore, the term can more broadly refer to any important and clearly defined human society.[citation needed] Still, even when used in this second sense, the word is often restricted to apply only to societies that have attained a particular level of advancement-especially the founding of cities.
The level of advancement of a civilization is often measured by its progress in agriculture, long-distance trade, occupational specialization, a special governing class and urbanism. Aside from these core elements, a civilization is often marked by any combination of a number of secondary elements, including a developed transportation system, writing, standardized measurement, currency, contractual and (tort-based) legal systems, characteristic art and architecture, mathematics, enhanced scientific understanding, metallurgy, political structures, and an astronomical understanding.
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Dilmun
Dilmun or Telmun is a land mentioned by Mesopotamian civilizations as a trade partner, a source of the metal copper, and an entrepôt of the Mesopotamia-to-Indus Valley Civilization trade route. Although the exact location of Dilmun is unclear, it might be associated with the islands of Bahrain, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and nearby Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf. It is also noted that Gilgamesh had to pass through Mount Mashu to reach Dilmun in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is usually identified with the whole of the parallel Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges, with the narrow gap between these mountains constituting the tunnel.
Dilmun appears first in Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets dated to the end of fourth millennium BC, found in the temple of goddess Inanna, in the city of Uruk. The adjective Dilmun is used to describe a type of axe and one specific official; in addition there are lists of rations of wool issued to people connected with Dilmun.
One of the earliest inscriptions mentioning Dilmun is that of king Ur-Nanshe of Lagash found in a door-socket: "The ships of Dilmun brought him wood as tribute from foreign lands."
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Enheduanna
Enheduanna (Akkadian: 𒂗𒃶𒁺𒀭𒈾; 2285-2250 BCE), also transliterated as Enheduana, En-hedu-ana or EnHeduAnna ("en" means High Priestess, and "hedu" means adornment, so this name translates to "high priestess adornment of the god, An"), was an Akkadian princess as well as High Priestess of the Moon god Nanna (Sin) in the Sumerian city-state of Ur. She was the first known holder of the title "En Priestess", a role of great political importance that was often held by royal daughters. Enheduanna was an aunt of Akkadian king Narām-Sîn, and she was one of the earliest women in history whose name is known.
Regarded by literary and historical scholars as possibly the earliest known author and poet of either gender, Enheduanna served as the High Priestess during the third millennium BCE. She was appointed to the role by her father, King Sargon of Akkad. Her mother was Queen Tashlultum. Enheduanna has left behind a corpus of literary works definitively ascribed to her that include many personal devotions to the goddess Inanna and a collection of hymns known as the "Sumerian Temple Hymns" that are regarded as one of the first attempts at a systematic theology. In addition, scholars such as Hallo and Van Dijk suggest that certain texts that have not been ascribed to her may also be her works.
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Enmebaragesi
Enmebaragesi (Me-Baragesi, En-Men-Barage-Si, Enmebaragisi, fl. ca. 2500 BC) was a king of Kish, according to the Sumerian king list. The list states that he subdued Elam, reigned 900 years, and was captured single-handedly by Dumuzid "the fisherman" of Kuara, predecessor of Gilgamesh.
He is the earliest ruler on the king list whose name is attested directly from archaeology. Two alabaster vase fragments inscribed with his name were found at Nippur where, according to the Sumerian Tummal Chronicle, he is said to have built the first temple.
He is also mentioned in a section of the original Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, Bilgamesh and Aga, as the father of the Aga who laid siege to Uruk. The Sumerian king list and the Tummal Chronicle concur with the Epic of Gilgamesh in making him the father of Aga, who was the final king of the 1st dynasty of Kish. Thus the fragments verifying Enmebaragesi's historicity enhance the notion that Gilgamesh is also historical.
The later Sumerian Renaissance (Ur-III) king Shulgi addressed one of his praise poems to Gilgamesh, that credits Gilgamesh with capturing and defeating Enmebaragesi — thus contradicting the king list, where he was already captured by Gilgamesh's predecessor. In another part of the Gilgamesh epic, Gilgamesh offers his "sister" Enmebaragesi to be the wife of the monster Huwawa or Humbaba, causing some debate as to Enmebaragesi's gender, with most scholars taking this reference as a jest.
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Etana
Etana was an ancient, legendary Sumerian king of the city of Kish, and was, according to the Sumerian king list, one of the kings who reigned after the deluge. He is listed as the successor of Arwium, the son of Mashda, as king of Kish. The list also calls Etana "the shepherd, who ascended to heaven and consolidated all the foreign countries", and states that he ruled 1560 years (some copies read 635) before being succeeded by his son Balih, said to have ruled 400 years.
A Babylonian legend says that Etana was desperate to have a child, until one day he helped save an eagle from starving, who then took him up into the sky to find the plant of birth. This led to the birth of his son, Balih.
In the detailed form of the legend, there is a tree with the eagle's nest at the top, and a serpent at the base. Both the serpent and eagle have promised Utu (the sun god) to behave well toward one another, and they share food with their children.
But one day, the eagle eats the serpent's children. The serpent comes back and cries. Utu tells the serpent to hide inside of the stomach of a dead bull. The eagle goes down to eat the bull. The serpent captures the eagle, and throws him into a pit to die of hunger and thirst. Utu sends a man, Etana, to help the eagle. Etana saves the eagle, but he also asks the bird to find the plant of birth, in order to become father of a son. The eagle takes Etana up to the heaven of the god Anu, but Etana becomes afraid in the air and he goes back to the ground. He makes another attempt, and finds the plant of birth, enabling him to have Balih.
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Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh ( /ˈɡɪl.ɡə.mɛʃ/; Akkadian cuneiform: 𒄑𒂆𒈦 [
𒂆
], Gilgameš, often given the epithet of the King, also known as Bilgames in the earliest Sumerian texts) was the fifth king of Uruk, modern day Iraq (Early Dynastic II, first dynasty of Uruk), placing his reign ca. 2500 BC. According to the Sumerian king list he reigned for 126 years. In the Tummal Inscription, Gilgamesh, and his son Urlugal, rebuilt the sanctuary of the goddess Ninlil, in Tummal, a sacred quarter in her city of Nippur. Gilgamesh is the central character in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the greatest surviving work of early Mesopotamian literature. In the epic his father was Lugalbanda and his mother was Ninsun (whom some call Rimat Ninsun), a goddess. In Mesopotamian mythology, Gilgamesh is a demigod of superhuman strength who built the city walls of Uruk to defend his people from external threats, and travelled to meet the sage Utnapishtim, who had survived the Great Deluge. He is usually described as two-thirds god and one third man.
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Hammurabi
Hammurabi (Akkadian from Amorite ʻAmmurāpi, "the kinsman is a healer", from ʻAmmu, "paternal kinsman", and Rāpi, "healer"; (died c. 1750 BC) was the sixth king of Babylon (that is, of the First Babylonian Dynasty) from 1792 BC to 1750 BC middle chronology (1728 BC – 1686 BC short chronology). He became the first king of the Babylonian Empire following the abdication of his father, Sin-Muballit, extending Babylon's control over Mesopotamia by winning a series of wars against neighboring kingdoms. Although his empire controlled all of Mesopotamia at the time of his death, his successors were unable to maintain his empire.
Hammurabi is known for the set of laws called Hammurabi's Code, one of the first written codes of law in recorded history.[citation needed] These laws were inscribed on stone tablets (stelae) standing over eight feet tall (2.4 meters), of unknown provenance, found in Persia in 1901. Owing to his reputation in modern times as an ancient law-giver, Hammurabi's portrait is in many government buildings throughout the world.
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Iranian languages
The Iranian languages (also called Iranic languages) form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages which in turn are a subgroup of the Indo-European language family. The speakers of Iranian languages are known as Iranian peoples.
The Iranian languages are considered in three stages of Old (until 400 BCE), Middle (400 BCE – 900 CE), and New (since 900 CE). From the Old Iranian languages the better understood and recorded ones are Old Persian (a language of Achaemenid Iran) and Avestan (the language of Zarathushtra). Middle Iranian languages included Middle Persian (a language of Sassanid Iran) and Parthian (a language of Arsacid Iran). There are many Iranian languages, the largest amongst them are Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, and Balochi.
Today, there are an estimated 150–200 million native speakers of Iranian languages. The Ethnologue lists 87 Iranian languages.Persian has about 65 million native speakers, Pashto about 50 million, Kurdish about 18 million, Balochi about 7 million, and Lurish about 2.3 million.
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Iraqi people
The Iraqi people (Arabic: العراقيون ʿIrāqīyūn, Kurdish: گهلی عیراق Îraqîyan, Aramaic: ܥܡܐ ܥܝܪܩܝܐ ʿIrāqāyā) or Mesopotamian people (Arabic: شعب بلاد ما بين النهرين) are the native inhabitants of the country of Iraq, (also known as Mesopotamia), and their related diaspora. From late Assyrian and Babylonian times until the early Islamic era, the Iraqi people spoke Aramaic but also witnessed a minority Arab presence.
Arabic had been a minority language in Iraq since the 8th century BC, it was spoken in Hatra in the 1st and 2nd centuries, and by Iraqi Christians in Al-Hirah from the 3rd century, and from the 8th century following the Muslim conquest of Mesopotamia it became the common language of Iraqi Muslims, due to Arabic being the language of the Qur'an and the Caliphate. This change was facilitated by the fact that Arabic being a Semitic language, shared a close resemblance to Iraq's traditional languages of Akkadian and Aramaic. Some of Iraq's Christians and Mandaeans retained dialects of Aramaic, since it remained the liturgical language of their faiths. Kurdish-speaking Iraqis live in the mountainous Zagros region of northeast Iraq to the east of the upper Tigris. The Kurds and Arabs of Mesopotamia have interacted and intermarried for well over a millennium. Modern genetic studies indicate that Iraqi Arabs and Kurds are very closely related. Arabic and Kurdish are Iraq's national languages.
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Leonard Woolley
Sir Charles Leonard Woolley (17 April 1880 – 20 February 1960) was a British archaeologist best known for his excavations at Ur in Mesopotamia. He is considered to have been one of the first "modern" archaeologists, and was knighted in 1935 for his contributions to the discipline of archaeology.
Charles Leonard Woolley was the son of a clergyman, and was brother to Geoffrey Harold Woolley and George Cathcart Woolley. He was born at 13 Southwold Road, Upper Clapton, in the modern London Borough of Hackney and educated at St John's School, Leatherhead and New College, Oxford. He was interested in excavations from a young age.
In 1905, Woolley became assistant of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Volunteered by Arthur Evans to run the excavations on the Roman site at Corbridge for Francis Haverfield, Woolley began his excavation career there in 1906, later admitting in Spadework that "I had never studied archaeological methods even from books ... and I had not any idea how to make a survey or a ground-plan" (Woolley 1953:15). T. E. Lawrence worked with Woolley on the excavation of the Hittite city of Carchemish from 1912-14.
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Mandaeans
Mandaeism or Mandaeanism (Modern Mandaic: Mandaʻiūtā (מנדעיותא); Arabic: مندائية Mandāʼīyah/Mandāʾiyyah; Persian: مندائیان Mandâ'iyân) is a gnostic religion[citation needed] (Aramaic manda means "knowledge", as does Greek gnosis) with a strongly dualistic worldview.
Its adherents, the Mandaeans, revere Adam, Abel, Seth, Enosh, Noah, Shem, Aram and especially John the Baptist, but reject Jesus of Nazareth and are hostile to Christianity. They are sometimes identified with mentions in the Quran of the Sabian religion, particularly in an Arabian context, but the Sabian religious community is extinct today.
According to most scholars, Mandaeans migrated from the Southern Levant to Mesopotamia in the first centuries CE and are certainly of pre-Arab and pre-Islamic origin. They are Semites and speak a dialect of Eastern Aramaic known as Mandaic. They may well be related to the "Nabateans of Iraq" who were pagan, Aramaic speaking indigenous pre-Arab and pre-Islamic inhabitants of southern Iraq.
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Marsh Arabs
The Marsh Arabs (Arabic: عرب الأهوار ʻArab al-Ahwār "Arabs of the Marshlands"), also known as the Maʻdān (Arabic: معدان), are inhabitants of the Tigris-Euphrates marshlands in the south and east of Iraq and along the Iranian border.
Comprising members of many different tribes and tribal confederations, such as the Āl Bū Muḥammad, Ferayghāt, Shaghanbah and Banī Lām, the Maʻdān had developed a unique culture centred around the marshes' natural resources. Many of the marshes' inhabitants were displaced when the wetlands were drained during and after the 1991 uprisings in Iraq.
Madan means "dweller in the plains (ʻadan)" and was used disparagingly by desert tribes to refer to those inhabiting the Iraqi river basins, and by those who farmed in the river basins to refer to the population of the marshes. There was a considerable historic prejudice against the Maʻdān, partly as they were considered to have Persian or other "mixed" origin and partly due to their practice of temporary marriage.
Some historians and archaeologists provide circumstantial evidence to posit that Iraq's Marsh Arabs share the strongest link to the ancient Sumerians.[citation needed] Although this is to do with their lifestyle and culture, more than any proven ethnic link, the Sumerians disappeared as a race circa 1800 BC, long before Arabs entered the region.
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Medes
The Medes (/midz/) (from Old Persian Māda-) were an ancient Iranian people who lived in Iran in an area known as Media and spoke a northwestern Iranian language referred to as the Median language. Their arrival to the region is associated with the first wave of Iranian tribes in the late second millennium BCE (the Bronze Age collapse) through the beginning of the first millennium BCE.
In the 7th century BCE a unified Median state was formed which together with Babylonia, Lydia, and Egypt became one of the four major powers of the ancient Near East. An alliance with the Babylonians helped the Medes to capture Nineveh in 612 BCE which resulted in the collapse of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The Medes were subsequently able to establish their Median kingdom (with Ecbatana as their royal centre) beyond their original homeland (central-western Iran) and had eventually a territory stretching roughly from northeastern Iran to the Halys River in Anatolia. The Median kingdom was conquered in 550 BCE by Cyrus the Great who established the next Iranian dynasty—the Achaemenid Empire.
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Mesilim
Mesilim or Mesalim (c. 2500 BC) was lugal (king) of the Sumerian city-state of Kish.
Though his name is missing from the Sumerian king list, Mesilim is among the earliest historical figures recorded in archaeological documents. He was a monarch in the 3rd Dynasty of Kish, reigning some time in the "Early Dynastic III" period (ca. 2500-2330 BC). Inscriptions from his reign state that he sponsored temple construction in both Adab and Lagash, where he apparently enjoyed some suzerainty.
Mesilim is best known for having acted as mediator in a conflict between Lugal-sha-engur, his ensi in Lagash, and the neighboring rival city state of Umma, regarding the rights to use an irrigation canal on the border between the two. After asking the opinion of the god Satarana, Mesilim established a new border between Lagash and Umma, and erected a pillar to mark it, on which he wrote his final decision. This solution was not to be permanent; a later king of Umma, Ush, destroyed the pillar in an act of defiance.
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Meskalamdug
Meskalamdug ("hero of the good land") was an early ruler (ensi[citation needed]) of Ur who does not appear in the Sumerian king list.
His tomb, discovered by English archaeologist Sir Leonard Wooley in the Royal Cemetery of Ur in 1924, contained numerous gold artifacts including a golden helmet with an inscription of the king's name. His wife's name was queen Ninbanda. Meskalamdug was also mentioned on a seal in another tomb with the title lugal (king), however because his own tomb lacked attendants, Woolley assumed that he was not royal. The controversy remains though, because he is named on a bead inscription discovered in Mari by French archaeologist André Parrot ten years later, as the father of king Mesannepada of Ur, who appears in the king list and in many other inscriptions.
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Puabi
Puabi (Akkadian: "Word of my father"), also called Shubad in Sumerian, was an important person in the Sumerian city of Ur, during the First Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2600 BCE). Commonly labeled as a "queen", her status is somewhat in dispute. Several cylinder seals in her tomb identify her by the title "nin" or "eresh", a Sumerian word which can denote a queen or a priestess. The fact that Puabi, herself a Semitic Akkadian, was an important figure among Sumerians, indicates a high degree of cultural exchange and influence between the ancient Sumerians and their Semitic neighbors.
British archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered the tomb of Puabi, which was excavated by his team along with some 1800 other graves at the "Royal Cemetery of Ur" between 1922 and 1934. Puabi's tomb was clearly unique among the other excavations; not only because of the large amount of high quality and well-preserved grave goods, but also because her tomb had been untouched by looters through the millennia.
She was also buried with 52 attendants — retainers who are suspected to have poisoned themselves (or had been poisoned by others) to serve their mistress in the next world. The amount of grave goods that Woolley uncovered in Puabi's tomb was staggering: a magnificent, heavy, golden headdress made of golden leaves, rings, and plates; a superb lyre (see Lyres of Ur), complete with the golden and lapis-lazuli encrusted bearded bulls head; a profusion of gold tableware; golden, carnelian, and lapis lazuli cylindrical beads for extravagant necklaces and belts; a chariot adorned with lioness' heads in silver, and an abundance of silver, lapis lazuli, and golden rings and bracelets.
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Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti (Arabic: صدام حسين عبد المجيد التكريتي Ṣaddām Ḥusayn ʿAbd al-Maǧīd al-Tikrītī; 28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organisation Ba'ath Party – Iraq Region, which espoused ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup, later referred to as the 17 July Revolution, that brought the party to long-term power of Iraq.
As vice president under the ailing General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and at a time when many groups were considered capable of overthrowing the government, Saddam created security forces through which he tightly controlled conflict between the government and the armed forces. In the early 1970s, Saddam nationalized oil and other industries. The state-owned banks were put under his control, leaving the system eventually insolvent mostly due to the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War, and UN sanctions. Through the 1970s, Saddam cemented his authority over the apparatuses of government as oil money helped Iraq's economy to grow at a rapid pace. Positions of power in the country were filled with Sunnis, a minority that made up only a fifth of the population.
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Samuel Noah Kramer
Samuel Noah Kramer (September 28, 1897 – November 26, 1990) was one of the world's leading Assyriologists and a world renowned expert in Sumerian history and Sumerian language.
Kramer was born on September 28, 1897 in Zhashkiv in the Russian Empire, the son of Benjamin and Yetta Kramer. In 1905 as a result of the anti-Semitic pogroms under Czar Nicholas II of Russia, his family emigrated to Philadelphia, where his father established a Hebrew school. After graduating from high school and obtaining a bachelor's degree, Kramer tried a variety of occupations, including teaching in his father's school, becoming a writer and becoming a business man.
Concerning the time when he began to approach the age of thirty, still without a career, he later stated in his autobiography, In the World of Sumer: "Finally it came to me that I might well go back to my beginnings and try to utilize the Hebrew learning on which I had spent so much of my youth, and relate it in some way to an academic future".
He enrolled at Dropsie College of Philadelphia for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, and became passionately interested in Egyptology. He then transferred to the Oriental Studies Department of the University of Pennsylvania, working with the "brilliant young Ephraim Avigdor Speiser, who was to become one of the world's leading figures in Near Eastern Studies". Speiser was trying to decipher cuneiform tablets of the Late Bronze Age dating from about 1300 BC; it was now that Kramer began his life-long work in understanding the cuneiform writing system.
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Sargon of Akkad
Sargon of Akkad, also known as Sargon the Great "the Great King" (Akkadian Šarru-kīnu, meaning "the true king" or "the king is legitimate"), was a Semitic Akkadian emperor famous for his conquest of the Sumerian city-states in the 23rd and 22nd centuries BC. The founder of the Dynasty of Akkad, Sargon reigned in the last quarter of the third millennium BC. He became a prominent member of the royal court of Kish, killing the king and usurping his throne before embarking on the quest to conquer Mesopotamia. He was originally referred to as Sargon I until records concerning an Assyrian king also named Sargon (now usually referred to as Sargon I) were unearthed.
Sargon's vast empire is thought to have included large parts of Mesopotamia, and included parts of modern-day Iran, Asia Minor and Syria. He ruled from a new, but as yet archaeologically unidentified capital, Akkad (Agade), which the Sumerian king list claims he built (or possibly renovated). He is sometimes regarded as the first person in recorded history to create a multiethnic, centrally ruled empire, although the Sumerians Lugal-anne-mundu and Lugal-zage-si also have a claim. His dynasty controlled Mesopotamia for around a century and a half.
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Semitic
In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic (from the Biblical "Shem", Hebrew: שם, translated as "name", Arabic: ساميّ) was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages. This family includes the ancient and modern forms of; Akkadian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Ge'ez, Maltese, Canaanite/Phoenician, Amorite, Eblaite, Ugaritic, Sutean, Chaldean, Mandaic, Old Persian, Ahlamu, Amharic, Tigre and Tigrinya among others.
As language studies are interwoven with cultural studies, the term also came to describe the extended cultures and ethnicities, as well as the history of these varied peoples as associated by close geographic and linguistic distribution.
The term Semite means a member of any of various ancient and modern Semitic-speaking peoples originating in southwestern Asia, including; Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Eblaites, Ugarites, Canaanites, Phoenicians (including Carthaginians), Hebrews (Israelites, Judeans and Samaritans), Ahlamu, Arameans, Chaldeans, Amorites, Moabites, Edomites, Hyksos, Arabs, Nabateans, Maganites, Shebans, Sutu, Ubarites, Dilmunites, Maltese, Mandaeans, Sabians, Syriacs, Mhallami, Amalekites and Ethiopian Semites. It was proposed at first to refer to the languages related to Hebrew by Ludwig Schlözer, in Eichhorn's "Repertorium", vol. VIII (Leipzig, 1781), p. 161. Through Eichhorn the name then came into general usage (cf. his "Einleitung in das Alte Testament" (Leipzig, 1787), I, p. 45). In his "Geschichte der neuen Sprachenkunde", pt. I (Göttingen, 1807) it had already become a fixed technical term.
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Sumerian king list
The Sumerian King List is an ancient manuscript originally recorded in the Sumerian language, listing kings of Sumer (ancient southern Iraq) from Sumerian and neighboring dynasties, their supposed reign lengths, and the locations of "official" kingship. Kingship was believed to have been handed down by the gods, and could be transferred from one city to another, reflecting perceived hegemony in the region. Throughout its Bronze Age existence, the document evolved into a political tool. Its final and single attested version, dating to the Middle Bronze Age, aimed to legitimize Isin's claims to hegemony when Isin was vying for dominance with Larsa and other neighboring city-states in southern Mesopotamia.
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Tashlultum
Tashlultum (late 24th-early 23rd centuries BCEfl. late 24th-early 23rd centuries BCE) was a queen of Akkad and wife of King Sargon of Akkad. She was the mother of his children Enheduanna, Rimush, Manishtushu, Shu-Enlil and Ilaba'is-takal. She was a grandmother of Naram-Sin of Akkad and great-grandmother of Shar-Kali-Sharri.
It is possible that her first husband was Lugalzagesi.
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Thorkild Jacobsen
Thorkild Jacobsen (7 June 1904 – 2 May 1993) was a renowned historian specializing in Assyriology and Sumerian literature. He was one of the foremost scholars on the ancient Near East.
Thorkild Peter Rudolph Jacobsen (Danish pronunciation: yahkobsen) received an M.A. from the University of Copenhagen and then came to the United States to study at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD.
He became a Field Assyriologist for the Iraq Expedition of the The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago (1929-1937) and in 1946 became Director of the Oriental Institute. He served as Dean of the Humanities Division (1948-1951), as an Editor of the Assyrian Dictionary (1955-1959), and as Professor of Social Institutions (1946-1962).
In 1962, Jacobsen became a professor of Assyriology at Harvard University, where he remained until his retirement in 1974. Beyond being an expert translator, he was a brilliant interpreter whose insights led to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the institutions and normative references of Sumerian and Akkadian culture.
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Sumerians and the Anunnaki. Presentation By Zecharia Sitchin (FULL)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 111:48
- Updated: 06 Mar 2013
This is a Presentation by the late and Great Zecharia Sitchin about his over 70 years of reseach. Zecharia Sitchin (July 11, 1920 -- October 9, 2010) was an ...
http://wn.com/Sumerians_and_the_Anunnaki_Presentation_By_Zecharia_Sitchin_FULL
This is a Presentation by the late and Great Zecharia Sitchin about his over 70 years of reseach. Zecharia Sitchin (July 11, 1920 -- October 9, 2010) was an ...
Phenomenon zecharia sitchkin The Lost Archives annunaki sumerian gods Genesis Revisited .avi
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 46:14
- Updated: 05 Mar 2013
documentary with zecharia sitchkin about nibiru,annunaki the sumerians and mankinds re-discovery of ancient knowledge already known by the sumerians and writ...
http://wn.com/Phenomenon_zecharia_sitchkin_The_Lost_Archives_annunaki_sumerian_gods_Genesis_Revisited_avi
documentary with zecharia sitchkin about nibiru,annunaki the sumerians and mankinds re-discovery of ancient knowledge already known by the sumerians and writ...
- published: 02 Dec 2011
- views: 198213
- author: The101enigma
Mesopotamia (Sumerians, first civilization on earth)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:35
- Updated: 05 Mar 2013
MesopotamiaSumerians first civilization on earth ... persia In The Sumerian CivilizationMy school project by Matt Stone 5604 views ... Yes I know i am not from sumer Mesopotamia isnt just sumer it's babylon and assyria and you know BTW it wasnt only arabs who attacked mesopotamia first the persians attacked the great Babylon and they succeded in taking it after a long time of wareven though babylon was way smaller was very powerful I am iraqbabylon and I do believe I descended in that place It ...
http://wn.com/Mesopotamia_Sumerians,_first_civilization_on_earth
MesopotamiaSumerians first civilization on earth ... persia In The Sumerian CivilizationMy school project by Matt Stone 5604 views ... Yes I know i am not from sumer Mesopotamia isnt just sumer it's babylon and assyria and you know BTW it wasnt only arabs who attacked mesopotamia first the persians attacked the great Babylon and they succeded in taking it after a long time of wareven though babylon was way smaller was very powerful I am iraqbabylon and I do believe I descended in that place It ...
- published: 10 Feb 2009
- views: 405392
- author: LIGHTOFPERSIA
Sumerian Texts Decoded
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 76:31
- Updated: 07 Mar 2013
Expert in theology, biblical languages, and world civilizations, Mike Heiser shared his research critique of Zecharia Sitchin's work. He believes Sitchin has...
http://wn.com/Sumerian_Texts_Decoded
Expert in theology, biblical languages, and world civilizations, Mike Heiser shared his research critique of Zecharia Sitchin's work. He believes Sitchin has...
- published: 24 Oct 2012
- views: 10348
- author: DiscloseTruthTV
Aliens & possiblity (Sumerians/ Nibiru) Michio Kaku
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:53
- Updated: 07 Mar 2013
Cut clips from previous videos on youtube (under 5 mins)Also look up the drake equation. Did this for GA Southern University project English 101.
http://wn.com/Aliens_possiblity_Sumerians_Nibiru_Michio_Kaku
Cut clips from previous videos on youtube (under 5 mins)Also look up the drake equation. Did this for GA Southern University project English 101.
- published: 09 Dec 2008
- views: 412378
- author: Dngle13erry
The first culture on this planet were the Sumerians 2012. Your history books lied to you! Sorry
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:28
- Updated: 24 Feb 2013
Open your mind and take down the wall infront our your brain.This wall consists of everything you think you know about science and history, you so know math ...
http://wn.com/The_first_culture_on_this_planet_were_the_Sumerians_2012_Your_history_books_lied_to_you!_Sorry
Open your mind and take down the wall infront our your brain.This wall consists of everything you think you know about science and history, you so know math ...
- published: 06 Apr 2012
- views: 2838
- author: TheOriginal FatDonkey
The Sumerians and the Annunaki - Part 1.
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:46
- Updated: 03 Mar 2013
The Anunnaki (also transcribed as: Anunnaku, Ananaki and other variations) are a group of Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian deities. The name is variously wr...
http://wn.com/The_Sumerians_and_the_Annunaki_Part_1
The Anunnaki (also transcribed as: Anunnaku, Ananaki and other variations) are a group of Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian deities. The name is variously wr...
- published: 02 Dec 2009
- views: 86561
- author: dumbbell33
FATHERS of CIVILIZATION.. The Sumerian Melanites of Nibiru
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:30
- Updated: 07 Mar 2013
FATHERS to CIVILIZATION.. ( IN UNDER 5-1/2 minutes) the Nubiruan/Sumerians, fathers to the Babylonians, Persians, mongols, romans kemetians etc.
http://wn.com/FATHERS_of_CIVILIZATION_The_Sumerian_Melanites_of_Nibiru
FATHERS to CIVILIZATION.. ( IN UNDER 5-1/2 minutes) the Nubiruan/Sumerians, fathers to the Babylonians, Persians, mongols, romans kemetians etc.
- published: 13 Feb 2008
- views: 148096
- author: TheMelaniteSociety
Ancient Sumerians and Planet X Nibiru
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:00
- Updated: 03 Mar 2013
an October 23, 1996 AP article entitled "New rebel planet found outside the solar system," disclosed the following: A new planet that breaks all the rules ab...
http://wn.com/Ancient_Sumerians_and_Planet_X_Nibiru
an October 23, 1996 AP article entitled "New rebel planet found outside the solar system," disclosed the following: A new planet that breaks all the rules ab...
- published: 06 Feb 2009
- views: 194753
- author: 2012december
Ancient Astronauts & Sumerian Texts with Mike Heiser
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 38:55
- Updated: 05 Mar 2013
expert in theology, biblical languages, and world civilizations, Mike Heiser shared his research critique of Zecharia Sitchin's work. He believes Sitchin has...
http://wn.com/Ancient_Astronauts_Sumerian_Texts_with_Mike_Heiser
expert in theology, biblical languages, and world civilizations, Mike Heiser shared his research critique of Zecharia Sitchin's work. He believes Sitchin has...
- published: 28 Sep 2012
- views: 5549
- author: DiscloseTruthTV
Ancient Kemetians, Greeks, Phonecians, Persians, Canaanites, and Sumerians
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 13:56
- Updated: 04 Mar 2013
Kemetians, Greeks, Phonecians, Persians, Canaanites, and Sumerians.
http://wn.com/Ancient_Kemetians,_Greeks,_Phonecians,_Persians,_Canaanites,_and_Sumerians
Kemetians, Greeks, Phonecians, Persians, Canaanites, and Sumerians.
- published: 24 Oct 2012
- views: 1316
- author: 5thDB
Sumerians and the Anunnaki 1/5 Genesis revisited
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:49
- Updated: 03 Mar 2013
This information in these videos are taken from the ancient Sumerian cuneiform texts. These text are one the oldest writings on the face of the earth and hav...
http://wn.com/Sumerians_and_the_Anunnaki_1_5_Genesis_revisited
This information in these videos are taken from the ancient Sumerian cuneiform texts. These text are one the oldest writings on the face of the earth and hav...
- published: 24 Dec 2009
- views: 75539
- author: enki35
The sumerians 2012 P3 arabic subtitles
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:12
- Updated: 03 Feb 2013
According to Zecharia Sitchin's interpretation of Sumerian cosmology, there is a hypothetical planet which follows a long, elliptical orbit, reaching the inn...
http://wn.com/The_sumerians_2012_P3_arabic_subtitles
According to Zecharia Sitchin's interpretation of Sumerian cosmology, there is a hypothetical planet which follows a long, elliptical orbit, reaching the inn...
- published: 03 May 2009
- views: 6035
- author: Sharbintellect
The Ancient Sumerians
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:14
- Updated: 26 Jan 2013
Sumer, Sumerian "land of the civilized lords" or "native land of the Assyrian, is a civilization and historical region of Mesopotamia, modern Iraq .
http://wn.com/The_Ancient_Sumerians
Sumer, Sumerian "land of the civilized lords" or "native land of the Assyrian, is a civilization and historical region of Mesopotamia, modern Iraq .
- published: 15 Sep 2011
- views: 6592
- author: TheSeekerOfAll
Sumerian Tales, Nibiru & Sitchin
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 37:40
- Updated: 29 Jan 2013
The webmaster of Sitchin's website, Erik Poltorak joined the show. He discussed stories from ancient Sumerian tablets, which were copied, borrowed, and reint...
http://wn.com/Sumerian_Tales,_Nibiru_Sitchin
The webmaster of Sitchin's website, Erik Poltorak joined the show. He discussed stories from ancient Sumerian tablets, which were copied, borrowed, and reint...
- published: 17 Oct 2012
- views: 1849
- author: DiscloseTruthTV
The-Sumerians-and-the-Annunaki-Part-4
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:56
- Updated: 01 Mar 2013
TheSumeriansandtheAnnunakiPart4. joemozzone109 videos. Subscribe Subscribed Unsubscribe 2831. 30141. Like 68 Dislike 2. Like .... Sumerians and the Anunnaki 25 Genesis revisitedby enki35 44381 views · 936. Watch Later Anunnaki Human DNA 2by johndoherty2012 144958 views · 15148. Watch Later Sumerians and the Anunnaki Presentation By Zecharia SitchinFULLmp4by ancientastronautgrp 3869 views · 1131. Watch Later ANUNNAKI From GENESIS to the PRESENT daySubtitulos ...
http://wn.com/The-Sumerians-and-the-Annunaki-Part-4
TheSumeriansandtheAnnunakiPart4. joemozzone109 videos. Subscribe Subscribed Unsubscribe 2831. 30141. Like 68 Dislike 2. Like .... Sumerians and the Anunnaki 25 Genesis revisitedby enki35 44381 views · 936. Watch Later Anunnaki Human DNA 2by johndoherty2012 144958 views · 15148. Watch Later Sumerians and the Anunnaki Presentation By Zecharia SitchinFULLmp4by ancientastronautgrp 3869 views · 1131. Watch Later ANUNNAKI From GENESIS to the PRESENT daySubtitulos ...
- published: 12 Jan 2011
- views: 30145
- author: joemozzone
The History and Achievements of the Sumerians
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:32
- Updated: 14 Feb 2013
A look into the political geography, social structure, and achievements of the Sumerians.
http://wn.com/The_History_and_Achievements_of_the_Sumerians
A look into the political geography, social structure, and achievements of the Sumerians.
- published: 24 Jul 2012
- views: 784
- author: Riley Heeren
History of Mankind - Part 43 - The Sumerians Revealed
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:43
- Updated: 04 Jan 2013
History of Mankind - Part 43 - The Sumerians Revealed. An interview with Jack through the Interdimensional Portal from the History of Mankind series discussi...
http://wn.com/History_of_Mankind_Part_43_The_Sumerians_Revealed
History of Mankind - Part 43 - The Sumerians Revealed. An interview with Jack through the Interdimensional Portal from the History of Mankind series discussi...
- published: 24 Dec 2011
- views: 5040
- author: LarysKaziukonis
Sumerians and the Anunnaki 2/5 Genesis revisited
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:51
- Updated: 22 Feb 2013
This information in these videos are taken from the ancient Sumerian cuneiform texts. These text are one the oldest writings on the face of the earth and hav...
http://wn.com/Sumerians_and_the_Anunnaki_2_5_Genesis_revisited
This information in these videos are taken from the ancient Sumerian cuneiform texts. These text are one the oldest writings on the face of the earth and hav...
- published: 24 Dec 2009
- views: 44542
- author: enki35
sumerians..annunaki..gray aliens..ufo..ancient technology..reptilians..photo evidence,
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:02
- Updated: 03 Mar 2013
sumerians..annunaki..gray aliens..ufo..ancient technology..egypyt..reptilians..lights on the back side of the moon..photo evidence..
http://wn.com/sumeriansannunakigray_aliensufoancient_technologyreptiliansphoto_evidence,
sumerians..annunaki..gray aliens..ufo..ancient technology..egypyt..reptilians..lights on the back side of the moon..photo evidence..
- published: 12 Apr 2011
- views: 36110
- author: Kimindigo
(RR) The Ancient Sumerians And The Nibiru Connection
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:04
- Updated: 28 Jan 2013
REPTILIAN RESEARCH LINKS FOR INFORMATIONAL STUDY The Awakening Has Begun Now Is The Time United We Stand Soldiers We Are... THE RESISTANCE !!!! They Shall Mi...
http://wn.com/RR_The_Ancient_Sumerians_And_The_Nibiru_Connection
REPTILIAN RESEARCH LINKS FOR INFORMATIONAL STUDY The Awakening Has Begun Now Is The Time United We Stand Soldiers We Are... THE RESISTANCE !!!! They Shall Mi...
- published: 22 Oct 2008
- views: 33196
- author: 4ReptilianResistance
Y-DNA & MTDNA OF THE SUMERIANS
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:16
- Updated: 11 Feb 2013
AFRICAN AND NEAR EASTERN POPULATIONS IN SUMERIA AFRICAN ADMIXTURE IN THE SUMERIANS AFRICAN PRESENCE IN SUMERIA AFRICAN Y-DNA E-M78, E-M123.
http://wn.com/Y-DNA_MTDNA_OF_THE_SUMERIANS
AFRICAN AND NEAR EASTERN POPULATIONS IN SUMERIA AFRICAN ADMIXTURE IN THE SUMERIANS AFRICAN PRESENCE IN SUMERIA AFRICAN Y-DNA E-M78, E-M123.
- published: 30 Jul 2012
- views: 926
- author: NileValleyHistory
Sumerians and the Anunnaki
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:49
- Updated: 25 Feb 2013
Ancient Aliens: Human Origins.
http://wn.com/Sumerians_and_the_Anunnaki
photo: AP / David Guttenfelder
07 Mar 2013
Posted. March 7, 2013. North Korea threatened a preemptive nuclear attack against the United States ahead of an upcoming vote on additional UN sanctions against Pyongyang. The country also accused the United States of performing military drills in South Korea as a launching pad for nuclear war. North Korea adds that it plans to scrap the armistice that ended Korean War hostilities ... The statement read. ... Category. Asia. Tags ... Posted ... ....(size: 2.5Kb)
photo: AP / Bullit Marquez
07 Mar 2013
The conflict has wreaked political havoc for both Malaysia and the neighboring Philippines ... Ismail said at least 52 Filipinos have now been killed in the past week since hostilities in the Sabah security crisis escalated ... World news....(size: 1.3Kb)
photo: AP / Aaron Favila
05 Mar 2013
Manila. Members of a major Philippine Muslim rebel force who were meant to have disarmed in the 1990s as part of a peace pact are involved in deadly battles in Malaysia, the group’s leader said on Tuesday. Nur Misuari, who founded the Moro National Liberation Front in the late 1960s, confirmed “freedom fighters” from his group were part of the militia sent by a self-proclaimed sultan to claim the Malaysian state of Sabah....(size: 2.6Kb)
photo: AP / Andrew Medichini
07 Mar 2013
Former Italian former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been sentenced to a year in prison over the publication of leaked transcripts from a police wiretap in one of his newspapers. Mr Berlusconi, who faces two more verdicts this month for tax fraud and having sex with an underage prostitute, can appeal the conviction and so doing suspend the sentence under Italian law ... ....(size: 1.7Kb)
photo: AP / Ariel Schalit
07 Mar 2013
9.58 PM. The U.N. is demanding the immediate release of 21 peacekeepers seized by members of the Syrian opposition in the disputed Golan Heights area between Syria and Israel. Here's a statement from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. ... "The Secretary-General reminds all actors in Syria that UNDOF is mandated to monitor the Disengagement of Forces Agreement between Israel and Syria ... The U.N ... A U.N ... Here's more from The New York Times. ... U.N ... ....(size: 4.0Kb)
Houston Chronicle
07 Mar 2013
Java Central. 10 places that make the Heights THE place to get a cup. Thursday, March 7, 2013. Comments. .. E-mail. ... I tell my kids about those days now and they look at me as if I was speaking in the dialect of the ancient Sumerians or telling them about, back in the day, if I wanted to listen to a song at the beginning of the album (album!!!), I had to hit the rewind button and, y’know, wait for an excruciating 10 or 11 seconds....(size: 9.4Kb)
Voa News
05 Mar 2013
The civil war in Syria has resulted in the deaths of more than 90,000 people and forced an estimaed three million to flee their homes. Now, experts fear the fighting also is destroying cultural artifacts and archeological sites on an unprecedented scale. ... ... ... ... Moaz Al-Khatib, Syrian opposition leader. At a conference on U.S ... ... ... Saoud acknowledges he had uncovered Bronze Age tablets containing Sumerian script....(size: 9.0Kb)
Taipei Times
04 Mar 2013
VEXOVOID, Portal, Profound Lore Records. Death metal usually has some kind of obscurantist content, secret messages to reward the listener’s desire to belong ... But to listen to Portal’s new record, Vexovoid, without reading the lyrics — assuming, let’s say, that you have a total lack of interest in amoral fantasy novels loosely derived from Sumerian myth — is to focus on issues of surface and sound and aural design ... ....(size: 3.3Kb)
The Examiner
04 Mar 2013
The nominees in 11 different fan-voted categories, plus the recipients of this year’s prestigious “Ronnie James Dio Lifetime Achievement Award,” (presented by Ernie Ball), “Golden God Award” (presented by Sumerian Records®), and “Riff Lord” (presented by EMG Pickups®), were revealed at a press conference held at the Hard Rock Cafe Hollywood in Los Angeles ... John 5John 5 ... Voting is currently open and ends on April 15 ... Video ... Tweet. 0 Email....(size: 6.8Kb)
Detroit Free Press
03 Mar 2013
A few years ago, I traveled through Syria as a tourist. One of the most striking spots was remote Palmyra, with its pristine Roman ruins. Now, nobody really knows what has happened to it. Last reports were of tanks parked amid the ancient columns while reckless fighters looted the site ... These artifacts date from the time of the Sumerians, Romans, Parthians, early Christians and early Islam, and are not even remotely replaceable ... ....(size: 3.6Kb)
Skiddle
02 Mar 2013
The Underworld, London Sat 2nd March 2013. Born of Osiris is a progressive metal band from Palatine, Illinois ... Date ... They are currently signed to sumerian records, which has released both of their full length albums (A Higher Place, and The Discovery) and their first EP/Mini-album, The New Reign ... ....(size: 1.5Kb)
Huffington Post
02 Mar 2013
March is here, which means the last month of winter is finally coming to a close and art admirers everywhere are slowly venturing out of their seasonal hibernation ... Loading Slideshow. Garry Winogrand. WHAT ... Image ... WHAT ... Image ... Bluechel's exhibit includes a number of sculptures that pay homage to various vessels and containers throughout history ("from Sumerian vessels to modern-day Tupperware," as the cheeky press release states)....(size: 9.6Kb)
IMDb
28 Feb 2013
Business Journal
28 Feb 2013
Mark Reilly Managing Editor- Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal Email . Twitter . LinkedIn . Google. A century-old creamery building in the west metro could join the Twin Cities' growing ranks of microbreweries ... Enki (the name comes from the Sumerian god of crafts, mischief and water) doesn't plan to serve food, but will include a tap room bar and outdoor beer garden overlooking Stieger Lake ... People....(size: 7.0Kb)
The Examiner
27 Feb 2013
On Feb. 25 the American mathcore band The Dillinger Escape Plan announced headlining tour dates for the spring of 2013. The North American tour begins in Lancaster, Pa. on April 22 and ends in Richmond, Va. on June 1. You can view a complete list of tour dates below. During The Dillinger Escape Plan's spring 2013 North American tour the band will perform 33 concerts over a six week time span ... in partnership with Sumerian Records ... Tweet ... ....(size: 6.6Kb)
San Francisco Chronicle
21 Feb 2013
(PRWEB) February 20, 2013 ... To date, membership is more than 2,000 strong and climbing ... Users can join in discussion threads on a range of topics and controversies, including everything from the true meaning of Sumerian Clay tablets, time travel and quantum leaping to September 11 coincidences and conspiracies. They can also seek help on how to deal with a possible alien abduction ... For the original version on PRWeb visit....(size: 3.2Kb)
noodls
20 Feb 2013
(Source. ROM - Royal Ontario Museum) Acclaimed exhibition makes its North American debut at the ROM during its international tour. © The Trustees of the British Museum The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) hosts Mesopotamia in its premiere North American engagement from June 22, 2013 to January 5, 2014 ... Dr ... Visitors will be surprised to learn just how much we owe to the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians." ... -30- ... distributed by ... (noodl....(size: 4.5Kb)
The Examiner
19 Feb 2013
The hieros gamos, or sacred marriage, was first mentioned in Sumerian writings 5000 years ago yet it is as pertinent to spirituality today as it was considered to be pertinent then ... Sacred marriage is typically restricted to those known as twin souls or soul mates, while a different relationship-based spiritual developmental process leading to soul mate status occurs for those who have not yet achieved it ... Resources ... Phone ... Phone ... Phone ... ....(size: 6.9Kb)
Sumer (from Akkadian Šumeru; Sumerian 𒆠𒂗𒂠 ki-en-ĝir15, approximately "land of the civilized lords" or "native land"[note 1])[1] was a civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. Although the earliest historical records in the region do not go back much further than ca. 2900 BC, modern historians have asserted that Sumer was first settled between ca. 4500 and 4000 BC by a non-Semitic people who possibly did not speak the Sumerian language (pointing to the names of cities, rivers, basic occupations, etc. as evidence).[2] These conjectured, prehistoric people are now called "proto-Euphrateans" or " Ubaidians",[3] and are theorized to have evolved from the Samarra culture of northern Mesopotamia.[4][5][6][7] The Ubaidians were the first civilizing force in Sumer, draining the marshes for agriculture, developing trade, and establishing industries, including weaving, leatherwork, metalwork, masonry, and pottery.[3] However, some, such as Piotr Michalowski and Gerd Steiner, contest the idea of a Proto-Euphratean language or one substrate language.
Sumerian civilization took form in the Uruk period (4th millennium BC), continuing into the Jemdat Nasr and Early Dynastic periods. It was conquered by the Semitic-speaking kings of the Akkadian Empire around 2270 BC (short chronology). Native Sumerian rule re-emerged for about a century in the third dynasty of Ur (Sumerian Renaissance) of the 21st to 20th centuries BC. The cities of Sumer were the first civilization to practice intensive, year-round agriculture, by perhaps c. 5000 BC showing the use of core agricultural techniques, including large-scale intensive cultivation of land, mono-cropping, organized irrigation, and the use of a specialized labour force. The surplus of storable food created by this economy allowed the population to settle in one place, instead of migrating after crops and grazing land. It also allowed for a much greater population density, and in turn required an extensive labour force and division of labour. Sumer was also the site of early development of writing, progressing from a stage of proto-writing in the mid 4th millennium BC to writing proper in the third millennium (see Jemdet Nasr period).
Contents |
Origin of name[link]
The term "Sumerian" is the common name given to the ancient non-Semitic inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia, Sumer, by the Semitic Akkadians. The Sumerians referred to themselves as ùĝ saĝ gíg-ga (cuneiform: 𒌦 𒊕 𒈪 𒂵), phonetically uŋ saŋ giga, literally meaning "the black-headed people".[8] The Akkadian word Shumer may represent the geographical name in dialect, but the phonological development leading to the Akkadian term šumerû is uncertain.[1][9] Biblical Shinar, Egyptian Sngr and Hittite Šanhar(a) could be western variants of Shumer.[9]
City-states[link]
Further information: Cities of the Ancient Near East and Geography of Mesopotamia
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By the late 4th millennium BC, Sumer was divided into about a dozen independent city-states, which were divided by canals and boundary stones. Each was centered on a temple dedicated to the particular patron god or goddess of the city and ruled over by a priestly governor (ensi) or by a king (lugal) who was intimately tied to the city's religious rites.
|
The five "first" cities said to have exercised pre-dynastic kingship:
Other principal cities:
(1location uncertain) |
Minor cities (from south to north):
(2an outlying city in northern Mesopotamia) |
Apart from Mari, which lies full 330 km (205 mi) northwest of Agade, but which is credited in the king list as having “exercised kingship” in the Early Dynastic II period, and Nagar, an outpost, these cities are all in the Euphrates-Tigris alluvial plain, south of Baghdad in what are now the Bābil, Diyala, Wāsit, Dhi Qar, Basra, Al-Muthannā and Al-Qādisiyyah governorates of Iraq.
History[link]
Main article: History of Sumer
The Sumerian city states rose to power during the prehistorical Ubaid and Uruk periods. Sumerian written history reaches back to the 27th century BC and before, but the historical record remains obscure until the Early Dynastic III period, ca. the 23rd century BC, when a now deciphered syllabary writing system was developed, which has allowed archaeologists to read contemporary records and inscriptions. Classical Sumer ends with the rise of the Akkadian Empire in the 23rd century BC. Following the Gutian period, there is a brief "Sumerian renaissance" in the 21st century BC, cut short in the 20th century BC by Semitic Amorite invasions. The Amorite "dynasty of Isin" persisted until ca. 1700 BC, when Mesopotamia was united under Babylonian rule. The Sumerians were eventually absorbed into the Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian) population.
- Ubaid period: 5300 – 4100 BC (Pottery Neolithic to Chalcolithic)
- Uruk period: 4100 – 2900 BC (Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age I)
- Uruk XIV-V: 4100 – 3300 BC
- Uruk IV period: 3300 – 3000 BC
- Jemdet Nasr period (Uruk III): 3000 – 2900 BC
- Early Dynastic period (Early Bronze Age II-IV)
- Early Dynastic I period: 2900–2800 BC
- Early Dynastic II period: 2800–2600 BC (Gilgamesh)
- Early Dynastic IIIa period: 2600–2500 BC
- Early Dynastic IIIb period: ca. 2500–2334 BC
- Akkadian Empire period: ca. 2334–2218 BC (Sargon)
- Gutian period: ca. 2218–2047 BC (Early Bronze Age IV)
- Ur III period: ca. 2047–1940 BC
Ubaid period[link]
Main article: Ubaid period
The Ubaid period is marked by a distinctive style of fine quality painted pottery which spread throughout Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. During this time, the first settlement in southern Mesopotamia was established at Eridu, ca. 5300 BC, by farmers who brought with them the Hadji Muhammed culture, which first pioneered irrigation agriculture. It appears this culture was derived from the Samarran culture from northern Mesopotamia. It is not known whether or not these were the actual Sumerians who are identified with the later Uruk culture. Eridu remained an important religious center when it was gradually surpassed in size by the nearby city of Uruk. The story of the passing of the "me" (gifts of civilisation) to Innana, Goddess of Uruk and of Love and War, by Enki, God of Wisdom and chief God of Eridu, may reflect this shift in hegemony.[11] It appears that this early culture was an amalgam of three distinct cultural influences: peasant farmers, living in wattle and daub or clay brick houses and practicing irrigation agriculture, hunter-fishermen living in woven reed houses and living on floating islands in the marshes (Proto-Sumerians), and Proto-Akkadian nomadic pastoralists, living in black tents.[12]
Uruk period[link]
Main article: Uruk period
The archaeological transition from the Ubaid period to the Uruk period is marked by a gradual shift from painted pottery domestically produced on a slow wheel to a great variety of unpainted pottery mass-produced by specialists on fast wheels.
By the time of the Uruk period (ca. 4100–2900 BC calibrated), the volume of trade goods transported along the canals and rivers of southern Mesopotamia facilitated the rise of many large, stratified, temple-centered cities (with populations of over 10,000 people) where centralized administrations employed specialized workers. It is fairly certain that it was during the Uruk period that Sumerian cities began to make use of slave labor captured from the hill country, and there is ample evidence for captured slaves as workers in the earliest texts. Artifacts, and even colonies of this Uruk civilization have been found over a wide area—from the Taurus Mountains in Turkey, to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, and as far east as Central Iran.[13]
The Uruk period civilization, exported by Sumerian traders and colonists (like that found at Tell Brak), had an effect on all surrounding peoples, who gradually evolved their own comparable, competing economies and cultures. The cities of Sumer could not maintain remote, long-distance colonies by military force.[13]
Sumerian cities during the Uruk period were probably theocratic and were most likely headed by a priest-king (ensi), assisted by a council of elders, including both men and women.[14] It is quite possible that the later Sumerian pantheon was modeled upon this political structure. There was little evidence of institutionalized violence or professional soldiers during the Uruk period, and towns were generally unwalled. During this period Uruk became the most urbanised city in the world, surpassing for the first time 50,000 inhabitants.
| Notable Sumerians | |
|---|---|
| Pre-dynastic kings: | Alulim • Dumuzid, the Shepherd • En-men-dur-ana |
| 1st Dynasty of Kish: | Etana • En-me-barage-si • Aga of Kish |
| 1st Dynasty of Uruk: | Enmerkar • Lugalbanda • Gilgamesh |
| 1st Dynasty of Ur: | Meskalamdug • Mesh-Ane-pada • Puabi • Mesilim of Kish |
| 2nd Dynasty of Uruk: | En-shag-kush-ana |
| 1st Dynasty of Lagash: | Ur-Nanshe • Eannatum • Entemena • Urukagina |
| Dynasty of Adab: | Lugal-Ane-mundu |
| 3rd Dynasty of Kish: | Kug-Bau |
| 3rd Dynasty of Uruk: | Lugal-zage-si |
| Dynasty of Akkad: | Sargon • Tashlultum • En-hedu-ana • Man-ishtishu • Naram-Sin of Akkad • Shar-kali-sharri • Dudu of Akkad • Shu-Durul |
| 2nd Dynasty of Lagash: | Puzer-Mama • Gudea |
| 5th Dynasty of Uruk: | Utu-hengal |
| 3rd dynasty of Ur: | Ur-Namma • Shulgi • Amar-Suena • Shu-Suen • Ibbi-Suen |
The ancient Sumerian king list includes the early dynasties of several prominent cities from this period. The first set of names on the list is of kings said to have reigned before a major flood occurred. These early names may be fictional, and include some legendary and mythological figures, such as Alulim and Dumizid.[15]
The end of the Uruk period coincided with the Piora oscillation, a dry period from c. 3200–2900 BC that marked the end of a long wetter, warmer climate period from about 9,000 to 5,000 years ago, called the Holocene climatic optimum.[16]
Early Dynastic Period[link]
The Dynastic period begins ca. 2900 BC and includes such legendary figures as Enmerkar and Gilgamesh—who are supposed to have reigned shortly before the historic record opens ca. 2700 BC, when the now deciphered syllabic writing started to develop from the early pictograms. The center of Sumerian culture remained in southern Mesopotamia, even though rulers soon began expanding into neighboring areas, and neighboring Semitic groups adopted much of Sumerian culture for their own.
The earliest Dynastic king on the Sumerian king list whose name is known from any other legendary source is Etana, 13th king of the first Dynasty of Kish. The earliest king authenticated through archaeological evidence is Enmebaragesi of Kish (ca. 26th century BC), whose name is also mentioned in the Gilgamesh epic—leading to the suggestion that Gilgamesh himself might have been a historical king of Uruk. As the Epic of Gilgamesh shows, this period was associated with increased violence. Cities became walled, and increased in size as undefended villages in southern Mesopotamia disappeared. (Gilgamesh is credited with having built the walls of Uruk).
1st Dynasty of Lagash[link]
 |
This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability. |
Main article: Lagash
ca. 2500–2270 BC
The dynasty of Lagash, though omitted from the king list, is well attested through several important monuments and many archaeological finds.
Although short-lived, one of the first empires known to history was that of Eannatum of Lagash, who annexed practically all of Sumer, including Kish, Uruk, Ur, and Larsa, and reduced to tribute the city-state of Umma, arch-rival of Lagash. In addition, his realm extended to parts of Elam and along the Persian Gulf. He seems to have used terror as a matter of policy—his Stele of the Vultures has been found, showing violent treatment of enemies. His empire collapsed shortly after his death. He is notable for the policy of having deliberately introduced the use of "terror" as a weapon against his enemies.
Later, Lugal-Zage-Si, the priest-king of Umma, overthrew the primacy of the Lagash dynasty in the area, then conquered Uruk, making it his capital, and claimed an empire extending from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. He was the last ethnically Sumerian king before the arrival of the Semitic king, Sargon of Akkad.
Akkadian Empire[link]
Main article: Akkadian Empire
ca. 2270–2083 BC (short chronology)
The Semitic Akkadian language is first attested in proper names of the kings of Kish ca. 2800 BC,[17] preserved in later king lists. There are texts written entirely in Old Akkadian dating from ca. 2500 BC. Use of Old Akkadian was at its peak during the rule of Sargon the Great (ca. 2270–2215 BC), but even then most administrative tablets continued to be written in Sumerian, the language used by the scribes. Gelb and Westenholz differentiate three stages of Old Akkadian: that of the pre-Sargonic era, that of the Akkadian empire, and that of the "Neo-Sumerian Renaissance" that followed it. Speakers of Akkadian and Sumerian coexisted for about one thousand years, until ca. 1800 BC, when Sumerian ceased to be spoken. Thorkild Jacobsen has argued that there is little break in historical continuity between the pre- and post-Sargon periods, and that too much emphasis has been placed on the perception of a "Semitic vs. Sumerian" conflict.[18] However, it is certain that Akkadian was also briefly imposed on neighboring parts of Elam that were previously conquered by Sargon.
Gutian period[link]
Main article: Gutian dynasty of Sumer
ca. 2083–2050 BC (short chronology)
2nd Dynasty of Lagash[link]
Main article: Lagash
ca. 2093–2046 BC (short chronology)
Following the downfall of the Akkadian Empire at the hands of Gutians, another native Sumerian ruler, Gudea of Lagash, rose to local prominence and continued the practices of the Sargonid kings' claims to divinity. Like the previous Lagash dynasty, Gudea and his descendents also promoted artistic development and left a large number of archaeological artifacts. After the fall of their empire, the Akkadians themselves essentially coalesced into two states; Babylon in the south and Assyria in the north of Mesopotamia.
Sumerian Renaissance[link]
Main article: Sumerian renaissance
ca. 2047–1940 BC (short chronology)
Later, the 3rd dynasty of Ur under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi, whose power extended as far as northern Mesopotamia, was the last great "Sumerian renaissance", but already the region was becoming more Semitic than Sumerian, with the rise in power of the Akkadian speaking Semites and the influx of waves of Semitic Martu (Amorites) who were later to found the Babylonian Empire. The Sumerian language, however, remained a sacerdotal language taught in schools in Babylon and Assyria, in the same way that Latin was used in the Medieval period, for as long as cuneiform was utilised.
Decline[link]
This period is generally taken to coincide with a major shift in population from southern Mesopotamia toward the north. Ecologically, the agricultural productivity of the Sumerian lands was being compromised as a result of rising salinity. Soil salinity in this region had been long recognized as a major problem. Poorly drained irrigated soils, in an arid climate with high levels of evaporation, led to the buildup of dissolved salts in the soil, eventually reducing agricultural yields severely. During the Akkadian and Ur III phases, there was a shift from the cultivation of wheat to the more salt-tolerant barley, but this was insufficient, and during the period from 2100 BC to 1700 BC, it is estimated that the population in this area declined by nearly three fifths.[19] This greatly weakened the balance of power within the region, weakening the areas where Sumerian was spoken, and comparatively strengthening those where Akkadian was the major language. Henceforth Sumerian would remain only a literary and liturgical language, similar to the position occupied by Latin in medieval Europe.
Following an Elamite invasion and sack of Ur during the rule of Ibbi-Sin (ca. 1940 BC), Sumer came under Amorite rule (taken to introduce the Middle Bronze Age). The independent Amorite states of the 20th to 18th centuries are summarized as the "Dynasty of Isin" in the Sumerian king list, ending with the rise of Babylonia under Hammurabi ca. 1700 BC.
During the third millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism.[20] The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and vice versa) is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a massive scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence.[20] This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium as a sprachbund.[20]
Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC (the exact dating being a matter of debate),[21] but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Mesopotamia (Babylonia and Assyria) until the 1st century AD.[22]
Population[link]
The Sumerians were a non-Semitic people, and spoke a language isolate; a number of linguists believed they could detect a substrate language beneath Sumerian, names of some of Sumer's major cities are not Sumerian, revealing influences of earlier inhabitants.[23] However, the archaeological record shows clear uninterrupted cultural continuity from the time of the Early Ubaid period (5300 – 4700 BC C-14) settlements in southern Mesopotamia. The Sumerian people who settled here farmed the lands in this region that were made fertile by silt deposited by the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
It is speculated by some archaeologists that Sumerian speakers were farmers who moved down from the north, after perfecting irrigation agriculture there [note there is no consensus among scholars on the origins of the Sumerians]. The Ubaid pottery of southern Mesopotamia has been connected via Choga Mami Transitional ware to the pottery of the Samarra period culture (c. 5700 – 4900 BC C-14) in the north, who were the first to practice a primitive form of irrigation agriculture along the middle Tigris River and its tributaries. The connection is most clearly seen at Tell Awayli (Oueilli, Oueili) near Larsa, excavated by the French in the 1980s, where 8 levels yielded pre-Ubaid pottery resembling Samarran ware. Farming peoples spread down into southern Mesopotamia because they had developed a temple-centered social organization for mobilizing labor and technology for water control, enabling them to survive and prosper in a difficult environment.[citation needed]
Others have suggested a continuity of Sumerians, from the indigenous hunter-fisherfolk traditions, associated with the Arabian bifacial assemblages found on the Arabian litorial. The Sumerians themselves claimed kinship with the people of Dilmun, associated with Bahrein in the Persian Gulf. Juris Yarins has suggested that they may have been the people living in the region of the Persian Gulf before it flooded at the end of the Ice Age.[citation needed]
Culture[link]
Social and family life[link]
In the early Sumerian period (i.e. Uruk), the primitive pictograms suggest[24] that
- "Pottery was very plentiful, and the forms of the vases, bowls and dishes were manifold; there were special jars for honey, butter, oil and wine, which was probably made from dates, and one form of vase had a spout protruding from its side. Some of the vases had pointed feet, and stood on stands with crossed legs ; others were flat-bottomed, and were set on square or rectangular frames of wood. The oil-jars - and probably others also - were sealed with clay, precisely as in early Egypt. Vases and dishes of stone were made in imitation of those of clay, and baskets were woven of reeds or formed of leather."
- "A feathered head-dress was worn on the head. Beds, stools and chairs were used, with carved legs resembling those of an ox. There were fire-places and fire-altars, and apparently chimneys also."
- "Knives, drills, wedges and an instrument which looks like a saw were all known, while spears, bows, arrows and daggers (but not swords) were employed in war."
- "Tablets were used for writing purposes, and copper, gold and silver were worked by the smith. Daggers with metal blades and wooden handles were worn, and copper was hammered into plates, while necklaces or collars were made of gold."
- "Time was reckoned in lunar months."
There is considerable evidence that the Sumerians loved music, which seems to have been an important part of religious and civic life in Sumer. Lyres were popular in Sumer.[citation needed]
Inscriptions describing the reforms of king Urukagina of Lagash (ca. 2300 BC) say that he abolished the former custom of polyandry in his country, by which a woman who took multiple husbands was stoned with rocks upon which her crime had been written.[25]
Though women were protected by late Sumerian law and were able to achieve a higher status in Sumer than in other contemporary civilizations, the culture was male-dominated. The Code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest such codification yet discovered, dating to the Ur-III "Sumerian Renaissance", reveals a glimpse at societal structure in late Sumerian law. Beneath the lu-gal ("great man" or king), all members of society belonged to one of two basic strata: The "lu" or free person, and the slave (male, arad; female geme). The son of a lu was called a dumu-nita until he married. A woman (munus) went from being a daughter (dumu-mi), to a wife (dam), then if she outlived her husband, a widow (numasu) who could remarry.
Language and writing[link]
Main articles: Sumerian language and Cuneiform
The most important archaeological discoveries in Sumer are a large number of tablets written in cuneiform. Sumerian writing is the oldest example of writing on earth. Although pictures - that is, hieroglyphs were first used, symbols were later made to represent syllables. Triangular or wedge-shaped reeds were used to write on moist clay. A large body of hundreds of thousands of texts in the Sumerian language have survived, such as personal or business letters, receipts, lexical lists, laws, hymns, prayers, stories, daily records, and even libraries full of clay tablets. Monumental inscriptions and texts on different objects like statues or bricks are also very common. Many texts survive in multiple copies because they were repeatedly transcribed by scribes-in-training. Sumerian continued to be the language of religion and law in Mesopotamia long after Semitic speakers had become the ruling race. The Sumerian language is generally regarded as a language isolate in linguistics because it belongs to no known language family; Akkadian, by contrast belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages. There have been many failed attempts to connect Sumerian to other language groups. It is an agglutinative language; in other words, morphemes ("units of meaning") are added together to create words, unlike analytic languages where morphemes are purely added together to create sentences.
Understanding Sumerian texts today can be problematic even for experts.[citation needed] Most difficult are the earliest texts, which in many cases do not give the full grammatical structure of the language.
During the third millennium BC, they developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism.[20] The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and vice versa) is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a massive scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence.[20] This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium as a sprachbund.[20]
Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC,[21] but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Babylonia and Assyria until the 1st century AD.
Religion[link]
Main article: Sumerian religion
There was no organized set of gods; each city-state had its own patrons, temples, and priest-kings. The Sumerians were probably the first to write down their beliefs, which were the inspiration for much of later Mesopotamian mythology, religion, and astrology.
The Sumerians worshipped:[citation needed]
- Anu as the full time god, equivalent to "heaven" - indeed, the word "an" in Sumerian means "sky" and his consort Ki, means "Earth".
- Enki in the south at the temple in Eridu. Enki was the god of beneficence, ruler of the freshwater depths beneath the earth, a healer and friend to humanity who in Sumerian myth was thought to have given humans the arts and sciences, the industries and manners of civilization; the first law-book was considered his creation,
- Enlil, lord of the ghost-land, in the north at the temple of Nippur. His gifts to mankind were said to be the spells and incantations that the spirits of good or evil were compelled to obey,
- Inanna, the deification of Venus, the morning (eastern) and evening (western) star, at the temple (shared with An) at Uruk.
- The sun-god Utu at Ur,
- The moon god Nanna at Sippar.
These deities were probably the original matrix;[citation needed] there were hundreds of minor deities. The Sumerian gods thus had associations with different cities, and their religious importance often waxed and waned with those cities' political power. The gods were said to have created human beings from clay for the purpose of serving them. If the temples/gods ruled each city it was for their mutual survival and benefit—the temples organized the mass labor projects needed for irrigation agriculture. Citizens had a labor duty to the temple which they were allowed to avoid by a payment of silver only towards the end of the third millennium. The temple-centered farming communities of Sumer had a social stability that enabled them to survive for four millennia.
Sumerians believed that the universe consisted of a flat disk enclosed by a tin dome. The Sumerian afterlife involved a descent into a gloomy netherworld to spend eternity in a wretched existence as a Gidim (ghost).[26]
Ziggurats (Sumerian temples) consisted of a forecourt, with a central pond for purification.[citation needed] The temple itself had a central nave with aisles along either side. Flanking the aisles would be rooms for the priests. At one end would stand the podium and a mudbrick table for animal and vegetable sacrifices. Granaries and storehouses were usually located near the temples. After a time the Sumerians began to place the temples on top of multi-layered square constructions built as a series of rising terraces, giving rise to the Ziggurat style.[citation needed]
Agriculture and hunting[link]
By 5000 BC the Sumerians had developed core agricultural techniques including large-scale intensive cultivation of land, mono-cropping, organized irrigation, and the use of a specialized labour force, particularly along the waterway now known as the Shatt al-Arab, from its Persian Gulf delta to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates.[citation needed] The surplus of storable food created by this economy allowed the population to settle in one place instead of migrating after crops and grazing land. It also allowed for a much greater population density, and in turn required an extensive labor force and division of labor. This organization led to the development of writing (ca. 3500 BC).
The Sumerians adopted an agricultural mode of life. In the early Sumerian period (i.e. Uruk), the primitive pictograms suggest that "The sheep, goat, ox and probably ass had been domesticated, the ox being used for draught, and woollen clothing as well as rugs were made from the wool or hair of the two first. ... By the side of the house was an enclosed garden planted with trees and other plants ; wheat and probably other cereals were sown in the fields, and the shaduf was already employed for the purpose of irrigation. Plants were also grown in pots or vases."[24]
The Sumerians practiced the same irrigation techniques as those used in Egypt.[27] American anthropologist Robert McCormick Adams says that irrigation development was associated with urbanization,[28] and that 89% of the population lived in the cities.[29]
They grew barley, chickpeas, lentils, wheat, dates, onions, garlic, lettuce, leeks and mustard. They also raised cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. They used oxen as their primary beasts of burden and donkeys or equids as their primary transport animal. Sumerians caught many fish and hunted fowl and gazelle.[30]
Sumerian agriculture depended heavily on irrigation. The irrigation was accomplished by the use of shadufs, canals, channels, dykes, weirs, and reservoirs. The frequent violent floods of the Tigris, and less so, of the Euphrates, meant that canals required frequent repair and continual removal of silt, and survey markers and boundary stones continually replaced. The government required individuals to work on the canals in a corvee, although the rich were able to exempt themselves.
After the flood season and after the Spring Equinox and the Akitu or New Year Festival, using the canals, farmers would flood their fields and then drain the water. Next they let oxen stomp the ground and kill weeds. They then dragged the fields with pickaxes. After drying, they plowed, harrowed, and raked the ground three times, and pulverized it with a mattock, before planting seed. Unfortunately the high evaporation rate resulted in a gradual increase in the salinity of the fields. By the Ur III period, farmers had switched from wheat to the more salt-tolerant barley as their principal crop.
Sumerians harvested during the spring in three-person teams consisting of a reaper, a binder, and a sheaf handler.[31] The farmers would use threshing wagons to separate the cereal heads from the stalks and then use threshing sleds to disengage the grain. They then winnowed the grain/chaff mixture.
Architecture[link]
The Tigris-Euphrates plain lacked minerals and trees. Sumerian structures were made of plano-convex mudbrick, not fixed with mortar or cement. Mud-brick buildings eventually deteriorate, so they were periodically destroyed, leveled, and rebuilt on the same spot. This constant rebuilding gradually raised the level of cities, which thus came to be elevated above the surrounding plain. The resultant hills, known as tells, are found throughout the ancient Near East.
According to Archibald Sayce, the primitive pictograms of the early Sumerian (i.e. Uruk) era suggest that "Stone was scarce, but was already cut into blocks and seals. Brick was the ordinary building material, and with it cities, forts, temples and houses were constructed. The city was provided with towers and stood on an artificial platform; the house also had a tower-like appearance. It was provided with a door which turned on a hinge, and could be opened with a sort of key ; the city gate was on a larger scale, and seems to have been double. The foundation stones - or rather bricks - of a house were consecrated by certain objects that were deposited under them."[24]
The most impressive and famous of Sumerian buildings are the ziggurats, large layered platforms which supported temples. Some scholars[who?] have theorized that these structures might have been the basis of the Tower of Babel described in Genesis. Sumerian cylinder seals also depict houses built from reeds not unlike those built by the Marsh Arabs of Southern Iraq until as recently as 400 AD. The Sumerians also developed the arch, which enabled them to develop a strong type of roof called a dome. They built this by constructing several arches. Sumerian temples and palaces made use of more advanced materials and techniques,[citation needed] such as buttresses, recesses, half columns, and clay nails.
Mathematics[link]
Main article: Babylonian mathematics
The Sumerians developed a complex system of metrology c. 4000 BC. This metrology advanced resulting in the creation of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. From 2600 BC onwards, the Sumerians wrote multiplication tables on clay tablets and dealt with geometrical exercises and division problems. The earliest traces of the Babylonian numerals also date back to this period.[32] The period 2700–2300 BC saw the first appearance of the abacus, and a table of successive columns which delimited the successive orders of magnitude of their sexagesimal number system.[33] The Sumerians were the first to use a place value numeral system. There is also anecdotal evidence the Sumerians may have used a type of slide rule in astronomical calculations. They were the first to find the area of a triangle and the volume of a cube.[34]
Economy and trade[link]
Discoveries of obsidian from far-away locations in Anatolia and lapis lazuli from Badakhshan in northeastern Afghanistan, beads from Dilmun (modern Bahrain), and several seals inscribed with the Indus Valley script suggest a remarkably wide-ranging network of ancient trade centered around the Persian Gulf.
The Epic of Gilgamesh refers to trade with FAR lands for goods such as wood that were scarce in Mesopotamia. In particular, cedar from Lebanon was prized. The finding of resin in the tomb of Queen Puabi at Ur, was traded from as far away as Mozambique.
The Sumerians used slaves, although they were not a major part of the economy. Slave women worked as weavers, pressers, millers, and porters.
Sumerian potters decorated pots with cedar oil paints. The potters used a bow drill to produce the fire needed for baking the pottery. Sumerian masons and jewelers knew and made use of alabaster (calcite), ivory, iron, gold, silver, carnelian, and lapis lazuli.[35]
Military[link]
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This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability. |
Early chariots on the Standard of Ur, ca. 2600 BC.
The almost constant wars among the Sumerian city-states for 2000 years helped to develop the military technology and techniques of Sumer to a high level. The first war recorded was between Lagash and Umma in ca. 2525 BC on a stele called the Stele of Vultures.[citation needed] It shows the king of Lagash leading a Sumerian army consisting mostly of infantry. The infantrymen carried spears, wore copper helmets and carried leather or wicker shields. The spearmen are shown arranged in what resembles the phalanx formation, which requires training and discipline; this implies that the Sumerians may have made use of professional soldiers.
The Sumerian military used carts harnessed to onagers. These early chariots functioned less effectively in combat than did later designs, and some have suggested that these chariots served primarily as transports, though the crew carried battle-axes and lances. The Sumerian chariot comprised a four or two-wheeled device manned by a crew of two and harnessed to four onagers. The cart was composed of a woven basket and the wheels had a solid three-piece design.
Sumerian cities were surrounded by defensive walls. The Sumerians engaged in siege warfare between their cities, but the mudbrick walls were able to deter some foes.
Technology[link]
Examples of Sumerian technology include: the wheel, cuneiform, arithmetic and geometry, irrigation systems, Sumerian boats, lunisolar calendar, bronze, leather, saws, chisels, hammers, braces, bits, nails, pins, rings, hoes, axes, knives, lancepoints, arrowheads, swords, glue, daggers, waterskins, bags, harnesses, armor, quivers, war chariots, scabbards, boots, sandals, harpoons, and beer. The Sumerians had three main types of boats:[citation needed]
- clinker-built sailboats stitched together with hair, featuring bitumen waterproofing
- skin boats constructed from animal skins and reeds
- wooden-oared ships, sometimes pulled upstream by people and animals walking along the nearby banks
Legacy[link]
Evidence of wheeled vehicles appeared in the mid 4th millennium BC, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia, the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe. The wheel initially took the form of the potter's wheel. The new concept quickly led to wheeled vehicles and mill wheels. The Sumerians' cuneiform writing system is the oldest which has been deciphered (the status of older inscriptions such as the Vinča signs and the even older Jiahu symbols is controversial). The Sumerians were among the first astronomers, mapping the stars into sets of constellations, many of which survived in the zodiac and were also recognized by the ancient Greeks.[36] They were also aware of the five planets that are visible to the naked eye.[37]
They invented and developed arithmetic by using several different number systems including a mixed radix system with an alternating base 10 and base 6. This sexagesimal system became the standard number system in Sumer and Babylonia. They may have invented military formations and introduced the basic divisions between infantry, cavalry, and archers. They developed the first known codified legal and administrative systems, complete with courts, jails, and government records. The first true city states arose in Sumer, roughly contemporaneously with similar entities in what is now Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Several centuries after the invention of cuneiform, the use of writing expanded beyond debt/payment certificates and inventory lists to be applied for the first time, about 2600 BC, to messages and mail delivery, history, legend, mathematics, astronomical records, and other pursuits. Conjointly with the spread of writing, the first formal schools were established, usually under the auspices of a city-state's primary temple.
Finally, the Sumerians ushered in the age of intensive agriculture and irrigation. Emmer wheat, barley, sheep (starting as mouflon), and cattle (starting as aurochs) were foremost among the species cultivated and raised for the first time on a grand scale.
See also[link]
Notes[link]
- ^ ĝir15 means "native, local", in some contexts is "noble"(ĝir NATIVE (7x: Old Babylonian) from The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary). Literally, "land of the native (local, noble) lords". Stiebing (1994) has "Land of the Lords of Brightness" (William Stiebing, Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture). Postgate (1994) takes en as substituting eme "language", translating "land of the Sumerian tongue" (John Nicholas Postgate (1994). Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History. Routledge (UK). . Postgate believes it likely that eme, 'tongue', became en, 'lord', through consonantal assimilation.)
Citations[link]
- ^ a b "Sumerian Questions and Answers". Sumerian.org. http://www.sumerian.org/sumerfaq.htm#s37. Retrieved 2012-03-29.
- ^ Bertman, Stephen (2003). Handbook to life in ancient Mesopotamia. Facts on File. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-8160-4346-0. http://books.google.com/?id=3bX3HYm5YMAC&pg=PA143&dq=Sumer+first+settled+language#v=onepage&q=Sumer%20first%20settled%20language&f=false.
- ^ a b "Sumer (ancient region, Iraq)". Britannica Online Encyclopedia. Britannica.com. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/573176/Sumer. Retrieved 2012-03-29.
- ^ Kleniewski, Nancy; Thomas, Alexander R (2010-03-26). Cities, Change, and Conflict: A Political Economy of Urban Life. ISBN 978-0-495-81222-7. http://books.google.com/?id=dWuQ70MtnIQC&pg=PA51&dq=samarra+culture#v=snippet&q=%22As%20the%20Samarra%20culture%20spread%20south%2C%20it%20evolved%20into%20the%20Ubaid%20culture%22&f=false.
- ^ Maisels, Charles Keith (1993). The Near East: Archaeology in the "Cradle of Civilization". ISBN 978-0-415-04742-5. http://books.google.com/?id=tupSM5y9yEkC&pg=PA139&dq=samarra+culture#v=onepage&q=%22cultural%20descendants%20of%20the%20originating%20Samarran%20culture%22&f=false.
- ^ Maisels, Charles Keith (2001). Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China. ISBN 978-0-415-10976-5. http://books.google.com/?id=i7_hcCxJd9AC&pg=PA147&dq=ubaid+samarra#v=snippet&q=%22Ubaid%200%20is%20thus%20clearly%20derived%20from%20the%20earliest%20culture%20to%20move%20into%20lower%20mesopotamia%2C%20the%20Samarra%22&f=false.
- ^ Shaw, Ian; Jameson, Robert (2002). A dictionary of archaeology. ISBN 978-0-631-23583-5. http://books.google.com/?id=zmvNogJO2ZgC&pg=PA505&dq=samarra+culture#v=onepage&q=%22similar%20to%20those%20of%20the%20ubaid%20period%22&f=false.
- ^ W. Hallo, W. Simpson (1971). The Ancient Near East. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. p. 28.
- ^ a b K. van der Toorn, P. W. van der Horst (Jan 1990). "Nimrod before and after the Bible". The Harvard Theological Review 83 (1): 1–29.
- ^ Stanley A. Freed, Research Pitfalls as a Result of the Restoration of Museum Specimens, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 376, The Research Potential of Anthropological Museum Collections pages 229–245, December 1981.
- ^ Wolkstein, Dianna and Kramer, Samuel Noah "Innana: Queen of Heaven and Earth".
- ^ Leick, Gwendolyn (2001), "Mespotamia: the Invention of the City" (Allen Lane)
- ^ a b Algaze, Guillermo (2005) "The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization", (Second Edition, University of Chicago Press)
- ^ Jacobsen, Thorkild (Ed) (1939),"The Sumerian King List" (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago; Assyriological Studies, No. 11.)
- ^ Jacobsen, Thorkild (1939) "Sumerian King List" (Univ of Chicago)
- ^ Lamb, Hubert H. (1995). Climate, History, and the Modern World. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-12735-1
- ^ Roux, Georges "Ancient Iraq" (Penguin Harmondsworth)
- ^ Toward the Image of Tammuz and Other Essays on Mesopotamian History and Culture by T. Jacobsen
- ^ Thompson, William R.; Hay, ID (2004). "Complexity, Diminishing Marginal Returns and Serial Mesopotamian Fragmentation" (PDF). Journal of World Systems Research 28 (12): 1187–98. DOI:10.1007/s00268-004-7605-z. PMID 15517490. http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol10/number3/pdf/jwsr-v10n3-thompson.pdf.
- ^ a b c d e f Deutscher, Guy (2007). Syntactic Change in Akkadian: The Evolution of Sentential Complementation. Oxford University Press US. pp. 20–21. ISBN 978-0-19-953222-3. http://books.google.com/?id=XFwUxmCdG94C.
- ^ a b Woods C. 2006 “Bilingualism, Scribal Learning, and the Death of Sumerian”. In S.L. Sanders (ed) Margins of Writing, Origins of Culture: 91-120 Chicago
- ^ Campbell, Lyle; Mauricio J. Mixco (2007). A glossary of historical linguistics. Edinburgh University Press. p. 196. ISBN 978-0-7486-2379-2.
- ^ Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat (30 September 1998). Daily life in ancient Mesopotamia. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-313-29497-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=lbmXsaTGNKUC&pg=PA13. Retrieved 29 November 2011.
- ^ a b c Sayce, Rev. A. H. (1908). The Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions" (2nd revised ed.). London, Brighton, New York: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. pp. 98-100. http://www.archive.org/stream/archaeologyofcun00sayc/archaeologyofcun00sayc_djvu.txt.
- ^ Gender and the Journal: Diaries and Academic Discourse p. 62 by Cinthia Gannett, 1992
- ^ "Gods, Demons, and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia". Google Books. http://books.google.com/books?id=pr8-i1iFnIQC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 2012-03-29.
- ^ Mackenzie, Donald Alexander (1927). Footprints of Early Man. Blackie & Son Limited.
- ^ Adams, R. McC. (1981). Heartland of Cities. University of Chicago Press.
- ^ http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres2a.pdf[dead link]
- ^ Tannahill, Reay (1968). The fine art of food. Folio Society. [page needed]
- ^ By the sweat of thy brow: Work in the Western world, Melvin Kranzberg, Joseph Gies, Putnam, 1975
- ^ Duncan J. Melville (2003). Third Millennium Chronology, Third Millennium Mathematics. St. Lawrence University.
- ^ Ifrah 2001:11
- ^ Anderson, Marlow; Wilson, Robin J. (October 14, 2004). "Sherlock Holmes in Babylon: and other tales of mathematical history". Google Books. http://books.google.com/books?id=BKRE5AjRM3AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=sherlock+holmes+in+babylon&sig=ACfU3U2XZtiWSoTgchQhcKHQD95X3F-35Q#PPA7,M1. Retrieved 2012-03-29.
- ^ Diplomacy by design: Luxury arts and an "international style" in the ancient Near East, 1400-1200 BCE, Marian H. Feldman, University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 120-121
- ^ Gary Thompson. "History of Constellation and Star Names". Members.optusnet.com.au. http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gtosiris/page11-4.html. Retrieved 2012-03-29. [unreliable source]
- ^ "Sumerian Questions and Answers". Sumerian.org. http://www.sumerian.org/sumerfaq.htm#s39. Retrieved 2012-03-29.
Further reading[link]
-
- Ascalone, Enrico. 2007. Mesopotamia: Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians (Dictionaries of Civilizations; 1). Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-25266-7 (paperback).
- Bottéro, Jean, André Finet, Bertrand Lafont, and George Roux. 2001. Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. Edingurgh: Edinburgh University Press, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Crawford, Harriet E. W. 2004. Sumer and the Sumerians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Leick, Gwendolyn. 2002. Mesopotamia: Invention of the City. London and New York: Penguin.
- Lloyd, Seton. 1978. The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: From the Old Stone Age to the Persian Conquest. London: Thames and Hudson.
- Nemet-Nejat, Karen Rhea. 1998. Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. London and Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
- Kramer, Samuel Noah (1963). The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-45238-7.
- Kramer, Samuel Noah. Sumerian Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium BC.
- Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sumerians : Their History, Culture, and Character.
- Roux, Georges. 1992. Ancient Iraq, 560 pages. London: Penguin (earlier printings may have different pagination: 1966, 480 pages, Pelican; 1964, 431 pages, London: Allen and Urwin).
- Schomp, Virginia. Ancient Mesopotamia: The Sumerians, Babylonians, And Assyrians.
- Sumer: Cities of Eden (Timelife Lost Civilizations). Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1993 (hardcover, ISBN 0-8094-9887-1).
- Woolley, C. Leonard. 1929. The Sumerians. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
External links[link]
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sumer |
- Ancient Sumer History --- The History of the Ancient Near East Electronic Compendium
- Iraq’s Ancient Past — Penn Museum
- Geography
- Map of The Fertile Crescent
- The History Files Ancient Mesopotamia
- Language
- Sumerian Language Page, perhaps the oldest Sumerian website on the web (it dates back to 1996), features compiled lexicon, detailed FAQ, extensive links, and so on.
- ETCSL: The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature has complete translations of more than 400 Sumerian literary texts.
- PSD: The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, while still in its initial stages, can be searched on-line, from August 2004.
- CDLI: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative a large corpus of Sumerian texts in transliteration, largely from the Early Dynastic and Ur III periods, accessible with images.
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
"Twelfth planet" redirects here. For other uses, see Twelfth planet (disambiguation).
"Nibiru (hypothetical planet)" redirects here. For the "Nibiru" of the 2012 phenomenon, see Nibiru cataclysm.
| Zecharia Sitchin | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | July 11, 1920 Baku, Azerbaijan SSR |
| Died | October 9, 2010( 2010-10-09) (aged 90) New York, New York |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | London School of Economics, University of London |
| Known for | Ancient astronauts |
| Website | |
| http://www.sitchin.com/ | |
Zecharia Sitchin (July 11, 1920 – October 9, 2010[1]) was an Azerbaijani-born American author of books proposing an explanation for human origins involving ancient astronauts. Sitchin attributes the creation of the ancient Sumerian culture to the Anunnaki, which he states was a race of extra-terrestrials from a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. He believed this hypothetical planet of Nibiru to be in an elongated, elliptical orbit in the Earth's own Solar System, asserting that Sumerian mythology reflects this view. Sitchin's books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Sitchin's ideas were rejected by scientists and academics, who dismiss his work as pseudoscience and pseudohistory. Sitchin's work has been criticized for flawed methodology and mistranslations of ancient texts as well as for incorrect astronomical and scientific claims.[2]
Contents |
Early life[link]
Sitchin was born in the then Azerbaijan SSR of the Soviet Union, but was raised in Palestine. He received a degree in economics from the University of London, and was an editor and journalist in Israel, before moving to New York in 1952. While working as an executive for a shipping company, he taught himself Sumerian cuneiform and visited several archaeological sites.[3][4]
Ideas and works[link]
 |
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Similarly to earlier authors such as Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Däniken, Sitchin advocated hypotheses in which extraterrestrial events supposedly played a significant role in ancient human history.
According to Sitchin's interpretation of Mesopotamian iconography and symbology, outlined in his 1976 book The 12th Planet and its sequels, there is an undiscovered planet beyond Neptune that follows a long, elliptical orbit, reaching the inner solar system roughly every 3,600 years. This planet is called Nibiru (although Jupiter was the planet associated with the god Marduk in Babylonian cosmology).[5] According to Sitchin, Nibiru (whose name was replaced with MARDUK in original legends by the Babylonian ruler of the same name in an attempt to co-opt the creation for himself, leading to some confusion among readers) collided catastrophically with Tiamat (a goddess in the Babylonian creation myth the Enûma Eliš), which he considers to be another planet once located between Mars and Jupiter. This collision supposedly formed the planet Earth, the asteroid belt, and the comets. Sitchin states that when struck by one of planet Nibiru's moons, Tiamat split in two, and then on a second pass Nibiru itself struck the broken fragments and one half of Tiamat became the asteroid belt. The second half, struck again by one of Nibiru's moons, was pushed into a new orbit and became today's planet Earth.
According to Sitchin, Nibiru (called "the twelfth planet" because, Sitchin claimed, the Sumerians' gods-given conception of the Solar System counted all eight planets, plus Pluto, the Sun and the Moon) was the home of a technologically advanced human-like extraterrestrial race called the Anunnaki in Sumerian myth, who Sitchin states are called the Nephilim in Genesis. He wrote that they evolved after Nibiru entered the solar system and first arrived on Earth probably 450,000 years ago, looking for minerals, especially gold, which they found and mined in Africa. Sitchin states that these "gods" were the rank-and-file workers of the colonial expedition to Earth from planet Nibiru.
Sitchin wrote that Enki suggested that to relieve the Anunnaki, who had mutinied over their dissatisfaction with their working conditions, that primitive workers (Homo sapiens) be created by genetic engineering as slaves to replace them in the gold mines by crossing extraterrestrial genes with those of Homo erectus.[6][7] According to Sitchin, ancient inscriptions report that the human civilization in Sumer, Mesopotamia, was set up under the guidance of these "gods", and human kingship was inaugurated to provide intermediaries between mankind and the Anunnaki (creating the "divine right of kings" doctrine). Sitchin believes that fallout from nuclear weapons, used during a war between factions of the extraterrestrials, is the "evil wind" described in the Lament for Ur that destroyed Ur around 2000 BC. Sitchin states the exact year is 2024 BC.[8] Sitchin says that his research coincides with many biblical texts, and that biblical texts come originally from Sumerian writings.
Popularity[link]
Since the release of his first book The 12th Planet in 1976, now in its 45th printing, Zecharia Sitchin has written seven other books as part of his Earth Chronicles series, as well as six other companion books, all of which are still in print as of 2010[update]. Sitchin's books have sold millions of copies worldwide and been published in more than 25 languages, as well as in braille.[9] New York Times reporter Corey Kilgannon noted that despite academic dismissal of his work, Sitchin has "a devoted following of readers".[3]
Critic Michael Heiser called Sitchin "arguably the most important proponent of the ancient astronaut hypothesis over the last several decades".[10] Sitchin was a frequent guest on the Coast to Coast AM radio show, which in 2010 presented Sitchin with a life-time achievement award.[11] Gods of the New Millennium author Alan F. Alford admits he initially became "infatuated" with Sitchin's hypotheses but later became a critic of Sitchin's interpretations of myth.[12]
According to some writers, Sitchin's ideas along with those of Erich von Däniken may have influenced the beliefs of the religious sect of Raëlism,[13][14] and writer Mark Pilkington sees the mythology of Japan's Pana Wave religious group as rooted in Sitchins The 12th Planet and its sequels.[15]
The 1994 movie Stargate, directed by Roland Emmerich, and the 2009 video game The Conduit drew some conceptual inspiration from Sitchin's ideas,[16][17] while screenwriter Roberto Orci says the villains of the film Cowboys and Aliens were inspired by Sitchin's conceptualization of the Anunnaki as gold-mining aliens.[18]
Criticisms[link]
Criticism of Sitchin's work falls primarily into three categories: translations and interpretations of ancient texts; astronomical and scientific observations; and literalism of myth.
Translations and interpretations[link]
When Sitchin wrote his books, only specialists could read the Sumerian language. However, sources such as the 2006 book Sumerian Lexicon[19] have made the language more accessible to non-experts. Ancient language scholar Michael S. Heiser[20] states he has found many inaccuracies in Sitchin's translations and challenges interested parties to use this book to check their validity.[15][21] Prof. Ronald H. Fritze,[22] author of the book Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions,[22] mentions the example of Sitchin's claim that the Sumerian sign Din-Gir means "pure ones of the blazing rockets", adding that "Sitchin's assignment of meanings to ancient words is tendentious and frequently strained."[23] Fritze also commented on Sitchin's methodology, writing that "When critics have checked Sitchin's references, they have found that he frequently quotes out of context or truncates his quotes in a way that distorts evidence in order to prove his contentions. Evidence is presented selectively and contradictory evidence is ignored."[23]
Sitchin bases his arguments on his personal interpretations of pre-Nubian and Sumerian texts, and the seal VA 243. Sitchin wrote that these ancient civilizations knew of a twelfth planet, when in fact they only knew five.[24] Hundreds of Sumerian astronomical seals and calendars have been decoded and recorded, and the total count of planets on each seal has been five. Seal VA 243 has 12 dots that Sitchin identifies as planets. When translated, seal VA 243 reads "You're his Servant" which is now thought to be a message from a nobleman to a servant. According to semitologist Michael S. Heiser, the so-called sun on Seal VA 243 is not the Sumerian symbol for the sun but is a star, and the dots are also stars.[24][25] The symbol on seal VA 243 has no resemblance to the hundreds of documented Sumerian sun symbols.
In a 1979 review of The Twelfth Planet, Roger W. Wescott,[26] Prof. of Anthropology and Linguistics at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, noted Sitchin's amateurishness with respect to the primacy of the Sumerian language:
Sitchin's linguistics seems at least as amateurish as his anthropology, biology, and astronomy. On p. 370, for example, he maintains that "all the ancient languages . . . including early Chinese . . . stemmed from one primeval source -- Sumerian". Sumerian, of course, is the virtual archetype of what linguistic taxonomists call a language-isolate, meaning a language that does not fall into any of the well-known language-families or exhibit clear cognation with any known language. Even if Sitchin is referring to written rather than to spoken language, it is unlikely that his contention can be persuasively defended, since Sumerian ideograms were preceded by the Azilian and Tartarian signaries of Europe as well as by a variety of script-like notational systems between the Nile and Indus rivers.[27]
Astronomical and scientific observations[link]
Sitchin's "planetary collision" view does superficially resemble a theory by modern astronomers—the giant impact theory of the Moon's formation about 4.5 billion years ago by a body impacting with the newly-formed Earth. However, Sitchin's proposed series of rogue planetary collisions differ in both details and timing. As with Immanuel Velikovsky's earlier Worlds in Collision thesis, Sitchin states that he has found evidence of ancient human knowledge of rogue celestial motions in a variety of mythological accounts. In Velikovsky's case, these interplanetary collisions were supposed to have taken place within the span of human existence, whereas for Sitchin these occurred during the early stages of planetary formation, but entered the mythological account passed down via the alien race which purportedly evolved on Nibiru after these encounters.
While Sitchin's scenario for the creation of the Solar System is hard to reconcile with the Earth's current small orbital eccentricity of only 0.0167, Sitchin's supporters maintain that it would explain much of Earth's peculiar early geography due to cleaving from the celestial collision, i.e., solid continents on one side and a giant ocean on the other.[citation needed]
According to former Immanuel Velikovsky assistant turned prolific critic,[28] C. Leroy Ellenberger,[28] "[Sitchin states that] from an equal start, the Nefilim evolved on Nibiru 45 million years ahead of comparable development on Earth with its decidedly more favorable environment. Such an outcome is unlikely, to say the least, since Nibiru would spend over 99% of its time beyond Pluto. Sitchin's explanation that heat from radioactive decay and a thick atmosphere keep Nibiru warm is absurd and does not address the problem of darkness in deep space. Also unexplained is how the Nefilim, who evolved long after Nibiru arrived, knew what happened when Nibiru first entered the solar system."[29]
The scenario outlined by Sitchin, with Nibiru returning to the inner solar system regularly every 3,600 years,
. . . implies an orbit with a semi-major axis of 235 astronomical units, extending from the asteroid belt to twelve times farther beyond the sun than Pluto. Elementary perturbation theory indicates that, under the most favorable circumstances of avoiding close encounters with other planets, no body with such an eccentric orbit would keep the same period for two consecutive passages. Within twelve orbits the object would be either ejected or converted to a short period object. Thus, the failed search for a trans-Plutonian planet by T.C. Van Flandern, of the U.S. Naval Observatory, which Sitchin uses to bolster his thesis, is no support at all.[29]
Sitchin in “the case of Adam’s alien genes”[30] states that 223 unique genes found by the Human Genome Sequencing Consortium are without the required predecessors on the genomic evolutionary tree. Later researchers have argued that the conclusion from the Human Genome Sequencing Consortium cannot be drawn due to a lack of a comprehensive gene database for comparison. An analysis by Salzberg identified 40 potential genes laterally transferred into the genome from prokaryotic organisms. Salzberg also argues that gene loss combined with sample size effects and evolutionary rate variation provide an alternative, more biologically plausible explanation.[31]
Literalism of myth[link]
Peter James, co-author of the controversial book Centuries of Darkness,[32] has criticized Sitchin both for ignoring the world outside of Mesopotamia and more specifically for misunderstanding Babylonian literature:
He uses the Epic of Creation Enuma Elish as the foundation for his cosmogony, identifying the young god Marduk, who overthrows the older regime of gods and creates the Earth, as the unknown "Twelfth Planet". In order to do as he interprets the Babylonian theogony as a factual account of the birth of the other "eleven" planets. The Babylonian names for the planets are established beyond a shadow of a doubt—Ishtar was the deity of Venus, Nergal of Mars, and Marduk of Jupiter—and confirmed by hundreds of astronomical/astrological tables and treatises on clay tablets and papyri from the Hellenistic period. Sitchin merrily ignores all this and assigns unwarranted planetary identities to the gods mentioned in the theogony. For example, Apsu, attested as god of the primeval waters, becomes, of all things, the Sun! Ea, as it suits Sitchin, is sometimes planet Neptune and sometimes a spaceman. And the identity of Ishtar as the planet Venus, a central feature of Mesopotamian religion, is nowhere mentioned in the book—instead Sitchin arbitrarily assigns to Venus another deity from Enuma Elish, and reserves Ishtar for a role as a female astronaut.[33]
William Irwin Thompson comments on what he calls Sitchin's 'literalism':
What Sitchin sees is what he needs for his hypothesis. So figure 15 on page 40 is radiation therapy, and figure 71 on page 136 is a god inside a rocket-shaped chamber. If these are gods, why are they stuck with our cheap B movie technology of rockets, microphones, space-suits, and radiation therapy? If they are gods, then why can't they have some really divine technology such as intradimensional worm-hole travel, antigravity, starlight propulsion, or black hole bounce rematerializations? Sitchin has constructed what appears to be a convincing argument, but when he gets close to single images on ancient tablets, he falls back into the literalism of "Here is an image of the gods in rockets." Suddenly, ancient Sumer is made to look like the movie set for Destination Moon. Erich Von Däniken's potboiler Chariots of the Gods has the same problem. The plain of Nazca in Peru is turned into a World War II landing strip. The gods can cross galactic distances, but by the time they get to Peru, their spaceships are imagined as World War II prop jobs that need an enormous landing strip. This literalization of the imagination doesn't make any sense, but every time it doesn't, you hear Sitchin say "There can be no doubt, but..."[34]
Bibliography[link]
Earth Chronicles volumes[link]
- The 12th Planet, New York: Stein and Day, 1976
- The Stairway to Heaven, 1980, Avon Books (Bear & Company, 1992, ISBN 0-939680-89-0; Harper, 2007, ISBN 0-06-137920-4)
- The Wars of Gods and Men, 1985, Avon Books (Bear & Company, 1992, ISBN 0-939680-90-4)
- The Lost Realms, Avon Books, 1990, ISBN 0-380-75890-3
- When Time Began, 1993, (Harper, 2007, ISBN 0-06-137928-X, ISBN 978-0-06-137928-4)
- The Cosmic Code, Avon Books, 1998, ISBN 0-380-80157-4
- The End of Days: Armageddon and Prophecies of the Return, William Morrow, 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-123823-9
Companion volumes[link]
- Genesis Revisited: Is Modern Science Catching Up With Ancient Knowledge?, (Avon Books, 1990, ISBN 0-380-76159-9)
- Divine Encounters: A Guide to Visions, Angels and Other Emissaries, Avon Books, 1995, ISBN 0-380-78076-3)
- The Lost Book of Enki: Memoirs and Prophecies of an Extraterrestrial god, Bear & Company, 2001, ISBN 1-59143-037-2
- The Earth Chronicles Expeditions, Bear & Company, 2004, ISBN 978-1-59143-076-6
- Journeys to the Mythical Past, Bear and Company, 2007 ISBN 978-1-59143-080-3
- The Earth Chronicles Handbook, Bear & Company, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59143-101-5
- There Were Giants Upon the Earth: Gods, Demigods, and Human Ancestry: The Evidence of Alien DNA, (Bear & Company), 2010, ISBN 978-1-59143-121-3
DVDs[link]
- Are We Alone in the Universe? (based on Genesis Revisited), documentary, 1978 (2003 DVD release)[35]
- An Evening with Zecharia Sitchin, lecture and slide presentation, 1997
- A Talk From The Heart!, lecture and slide presentation, 2006
- Signs of the Return, lecture and slide presentation, 2009
- 2012 - The End of Days?, lecture and slide presentation, 2010
- Zecharia at 90 - Farewell Address, lecture, 2010
See also[link]
References[link]
- ^ "The Official Web Site of Zecharia Sitchin". Sitchin.com. http://www.sitchin.com/. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
- ^ Carroll, Robert T (1994-2009). "The Skeptic's Dictionary". Zecharia Sitchin and The Earth Chronicles. John Wiley & Sons. http://www.skepdic.com/sitchin.html. Retrieved 29 October 2010.
- ^ a b Kilgannon, Corey (January 8, 2010). "Origin of the Species, From an Alien View". New York Times (The New York Times Company). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/nyregion/10alone.html. Retrieved 29 October 2010. "Mr. Sitchin has been called silly before — by scientists, historians and archaeologists who dismiss his hypotheses as pseudoscience and fault their underpinnings — his translations of ancient texts and his understanding of physics."
- ^ Phil Plait (2003). "X DOESN'T MARK THE SPOT IS THERE A PLANET X THAT WILL CAUSE GLOBAL CATASTROPHE NEXT MAY?". Globe and Mail. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/boston/access/232461161.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Nov+05%2C+2002&author=Phil+Plait%2C+Globe+Correspondent&pub=Boston+Globe&desc=X+DOESN%27T+MARK+THE+SPOT+IS+THERE+A+PLANET+X+THAT+WILL+CAUSE+GLOBAL+CATASTROPHE+NEXT+MAY%3F&pqatl=google. Retrieved 2012-01-10.
- ^ Jastrow, Jr., Morris (1911). Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria, G.P. Putnam's Sons: New York and London. pp. 217-219.
- ^ Sitchin, Zecharia (latest edition 2007). The Wars of Gods and Men: Book III of the Earth Chronicles. Harper. pp. 104–105. ISBN 978-0-06-137927-7.
- ^ Sitchin, Zecharia (1990). Genesis Revisited. Avon. pp. 157–182, chapter "The Adam: A Slave Made to Order. ISBN 978-0-380-76159-3.
- ^ "Evil Wind web page". Sitchin.com. 2001-04-27. http://www.sitchin.com/evilwind.htm. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
- ^ "Zecharia Sitchin Biography". Parkstpress.com. 2008-11-09. http://www.parkstpress.com/community/company-blogs/1-latest/373-sitchin-bio. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
- ^ Dirk Vander Ploeg, Wainfleet, Ontario, Canada. Telephone 905 834-2177, fax 905 312-9312 e-mail publisher@ufodigest.com. "Zecharia Sitchin: Why You Can Safely Ignore Him". Ufodigest.com. http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0909/ignore-him.php. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
- ^ Coast to Coast AM - George Noory Presents Zecharia Sitchin with Award, retrieved 15 April 2010
- ^ "Alan Alford website". Eridu.co.uk. http://www.eridu.co.uk/Author/human_origins/ancient_astronauts.html. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
- ^ Genta, Giancarlo (2007). Lonely Minds in the Universe: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Springer. p. 231. ISBN 978-0-387-33925-2.
- ^ Colavito, Jason (2005). The cult of alien gods: H.P. Lovecraft and extraterrestrial pop culture. Prometheus. p. 320. ISBN 978-1-59102-352-4.
- ^ a b Zechariah Sitchin, Mark Pilkington, Fortean Times, August 2003.
- ^ "The Conduit's Storyline". IGN. http://uk.wii.ign.com/articles/963/963610p2.html. Retrieved 2011-05-20.
- ^ Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, 2003, Stargate, Ultimate Edition, MGM DVD
- ^ Chitwood, Scott (2010-11-29). "Cowboys & Aliens Set Visit". Superhero Hype!. http://www.superherohype.com/features/articles/110995-cowboys-a-aliens-set-visit. Retrieved 2010-12-09.
- ^ Halloran, John A. (2006). Sumerian Lexicon: A Dictionary Guide to the Ancient Sumerian Language. The David Brown Book Company. ISBN 0-9786429-0-2.
- ^ "http://www.logos.com/academic/bio/heiser"
- ^ "http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/anunnaki/anunnaki.htm"
- ^ a b "http://www.corndancer.com/fritze/fritzebio.html"
- ^ a b Fritze, Ronald H,. (2009). Invented knowledge: false history, fake science and pseudo-religions. Reaktion Books. p214. ISBN 978-1-86189-430-4
- ^ a b "The Myth of a 12th Planet in Sumero-Mesopotamian Astronomy: A Study of Cylinder Seal VA 243 by Dr. Michael S. Heiser". Michaelsheiser.com. http://www.michaelsheiser.com/va_243%20page.htm. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
- ^ "The Myth of a 12th Planet" (PDF). http://www.michaelsheiser.com/VA243seal.pdf. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
- ^ "Roger W. Wescott - The Velikovsky Encyclopedia". Velikovsky.info. http://www.velikovsky.info/Roger_W._Wescott. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
- ^ Wescott, Roger W. 1979. Kronos Vol. IV, No. 4, pp. 90-92.
- ^ a b "http://www.velikovsky.info/C._Leroy_Ellenberger"
- ^ a b Ellenberger, C. Leroy 1981. Marduk Unmasked. Frontiers of Science, May–June, pp. 3-4.
- ^ "the case of Adam's alien genes". Sitchin.com. http://www.sitchin.com/adam.htm. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
- ^ Salzberg, Steven L. , Owen White, et al. “Microbial Genes in the Human Genome: Lateral Transfer or Gene Loss?”. Science 292.5523 (2001): 1903 – 3.
- ^ "http://www.centuries.co.uk/"
- ^ James, Peter SIS Workshop no. 7, vol. 2, no. 2 (Nov. 1979), reprinted from Fortean Times no. 27 (Nov. 1978).
- ^ Thompson, William Irwin Coming into being: artifacts and texts in the evolution of consciousness pp.75-76 [1]
- ^ Are We Alone in the Universe? at the Internet Movie Database
External links[link]
 |
Wikiversity has learning materials about Zecharia Sitchin |
- Official Website
- Kilgannon, Corey. "Origin of Species, From an Alien View", The New York Times, January 10, 2010. p. MB4.
- Zecharia Sitchin Audio Tribute on Coast to Coast AM
Criticisms[link]
- Ian Lawton's Mesopotamia Papers
- An Astronomer's View of the Akkadian Seal by Tom van Flandern
- SitchinIsWrong.com: A Polemical Website against the Theories of Zechariah Sitchin
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Sitchin, Zecharia |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | American Author |
| Date of birth | July 11, 1920 |
| Place of birth | Baku |
| Date of death | October 9, 2010 |
| Place of death | New York, New York |
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
| Michio Kaku 加来 道雄 |
|
|---|---|
| File:MichioKaku commons.jpg | |
| Born | (1947-01-24) January 24, 1947 (age 65) San Jose, California, United States |
| Residence | New York City, New York, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Theoretical physics |
| Institutions | City University of New York New York University Institute for Advanced Study |
| Alma mater | Harvard University (S.B., 1968) University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., 1972) |
| Doctoral advisor | Stanley Mandelstam |
| Known for | String field theory, popular science |
 |
This article contains Japanese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of kanji and kana. |
Michio Kaku (加来 道雄, Kaku Michio?, born January 24, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, a co-founder of string field theory,[1] a futurist, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books about physics and related topics; he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film; and he writes extensive online blogs and articles. He has written two New York Times best sellers, Physics of the Impossible (2008) and Physics of the Future (2011). He has hosted several TV specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery Channel, and the Science Channel.
Contents |
Early life and education[link]
Kaku was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake[citation needed]. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan and spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his two brothers were born.
At Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, Kaku assembled an atom smasher in his parents' garage for a science fair project.[2] At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972, and in 1972 he held a lectureship at Princeton University.
During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his U.S. Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced individual training at Fort Lewis, Washington.[3] However, the Vietnam War ended before he was deployed as an infantryman.
Academic career[link]
Kaku became a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,[4] and New York University.[5] He currently holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York.[6]
Kaku has had over 70 articles published in physics journals such as Physical Review, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics.[7] In 1974, along with Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University, he authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form.[8][9]
Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory.
Popular science[link]
Kaku is most widely known as a popularizer of science.[10] He has written books and appeared on many television programs as well as film. He also hosts a weekly radio program.
Books[link]
Kaku is the author of various popular science books.
- Hyperspace (1994)
- Beyond Einstein (with Jennifer Thompson) (1995)
- Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century[11] (1998)
- Einstein's Cosmos (2004)
- Parallel Worlds (2004)
- Physics of the Impossible (2008)
- Physics of the Future (2011)
Hyperspace was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both The New York Times[10] and The Washington Post. Parallel Worlds was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in the UK.[12]
Radio[link]
Kaku is the host of the weekly, one-hour radio program Explorations, produced by the Pacifica Foundation's WBAI in New York. "Explorations" is syndicated to community and independent radio stations and makes previous broadcasts available on the program's website. Kaku defines the show as dealing with the general topics of science, war, peace, and the environment.
In April 2006, Kaku began broadcasting Science Fantastic on 90 commercial radio stations, the only nationally syndicated science program on commercial radio in the United States. It is syndicated by Talk Radio Network and now reaches 130 radio stations and America's Talk on XM. The program is formatted as a live listener call-in show, focusing on "futurology," which he defines as the future of science.[citation needed] Featured guests include Nobel laureates and top researchers on the topics of string theory, time travel, black holes, gene therapy, aging, space travel, artificial intelligence, and SETI. When Kaku is busy filming for television, Science Fantastic goes on hiatus, sometimes for several months. Kaku is also a frequent guest on many programs, where he is outspoken in all areas and issues he considers of importance, such as the program Coast to Coast AM, where on 30 November 2007, he reaffirmed his belief that there is a 100% probability of extraterrestrial life in the universe.[13]
Kaku has appeared on The Opie and Anthony Show a number of times, discussing popular fiction such as Back to The Future, Lost, and the theories behind time-travel that these and other fictional entertainment focus on.
Television and film[link]
Kaku has appeared in many forms of media and on many programs and networks, including Good Morning America, The Screen Savers, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, Nightline, 20/20, Naked Science, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Al Jazeera English, Fox News Channel, The History Channel, Conan, The Science Channel, The Discovery Channel, TLC, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Colbert Report, The Art Bell Show and its successor, Coast To Coast AM, BBC World News America, The Opie & Anthony Show, The Covino & Rich Show, Head Rush, The Late Show with David Letterman, and Real Time with Bill Maher.
- We Are the Guinea Pigs (1980)
- Borders (1989)
- Synthetic Pleasures (1995)
- Einstein Revealed (1996)
- Future Fantastic (1996)
- Stephen Hawking's Universe (1997)
- Bioperfection: Building a New Human Race (1998)
- Exodus Earth (1999)
- Me & Isaac Newton (1999)
- Space: The Final Junkyard (1999)
- Big Questions (2001)
- Parallel Universes (2001)
- Horizon: "Time travel" (2003)
- Robo sapiens (2003)
- Brilliant Minds: Secret Of The Cosmos (2003)
- Nova: "The Elegant Universe" (2003)
- Hawking (2004)
- The Screen Savers (2004)
- Unscrewed with Martin Sargent (2004)
- Alien Planet (2005)
- ABC News "UFOs: Seeing Is Believing" (2005)
- HARDtalk Extra (2005)
- Last Days on Earth (2005)
- Obsessed & Scientific (2005)
- Horizon: "Einstein's Unfinished Symphony" (2005)
- Prophets of Science Fiction (2006)
- Time (2006)
- 2057 (2007)
- The Universe (2007)
- Futurecar (2007)
- Attack of the Show! (2007)
- Visions of the Future (2008)
- Horizon: "The President's Guide to Science" (2008)
- Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe (2008)
- Horizon: "Who's Afraid of a Big Black Hole" (2009–2010)
- Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible (2009–2010)
- Horizon: "What Happened Before the Big Bang?" (2010)
- GameTrailers TV With Geoff Keighley: "The Science of Games" (2010)
- How the Universe Works (2010)
- Seeing Black Holes (2010)
- Through the Wormhole (2011)
- Horizon: "What Happened Before the Big Bang?" (2011)
In 1999, Kaku was one of the scientists profiled in the feature-length film Me and Isaac Newton, directed by Michael Apted. It played theatrically in the United States, was later broadcast on national TV, and won several film awards.[citation needed]
In 2005, Kaku appeared in the short documentary Obsessed & Scientific. The film is about the possibility of time travel and the people who dream about it. It screened at the Montreal World Film Festival and a feature film expansion is in development talks. Kaku also appeared in the ABC documentary UFOs: Seeing Is Believing, in which he suggested that while he believes it is extremely unlikely that extraterrestrials have ever actually visited Earth, we must keep our minds open to the possible existence of civilizations a million years ahead of us in technology, where entirely new avenues of physics open up. He also discussed the future of interstellar exploration and alien life in the Discovery Channel special Alien Planet as one of the multiple speakers who co-hosted the show, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity on The History Channel.
In February 2006, Kaku appeared as presenter in the BBC-TV four-part documentary Time which seeks to explore the mysterious nature of time. Part one of the series concerns personal time, and how we perceive and measure the passing of time. The second in the series deals with cheating time, exploring possibilities of extending the lifespan of organisms. The geological time covered in part three explores the ages of the earth and the sun. Part four covers the topics of cosmological time, the beginning of time and the events that occurred at the instant of the big bang.
On January 28, 2007, Kaku hosted the Discovery Channel series 2057. This three-hour program discussed how medicine, the city, and energy could change over the next 50 years.
In 2008, Kaku hosted the three-hour BBC-TV documentary Visions of the Future, on the future of computers, medicine, and quantum physics, and he appeared in several episodes of the History Channel's Universe series.
On December 1, 2009, he began hosting a 12-episode weekly TV series for the Science Channel at 10 pm, called Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, based on his best-selling book. Each 30-minute episode discusses the scientific basis behind imaginative schemes, such as time travel, parallel universes, warp drive, star ships, light sabers, force fields, teleportation, invisibility, death stars, and even superpowers and flying saucers. Each episode includes interviews with the world's top scientists working on prototypes of these technologies, interviews with science fiction fans, clips from science fiction movies, and special effects and computer graphics. Although these inventions are impossible today, the series discusses when these technologies might become feasible in the future.[14]
In 2010, he began to appear in a series on the website Gametrailers.com called Science of Games, discussing the scientific aspects of various popular video games such as Mass Effect 2 and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
Kaku is popular in mainstream media because of his knowledge and his accessible approach to presenting complex subjects in science. While his technical writings are confined to theoretical physics, his public speaking and media appearances cover a broad range of topics, from the Kardashev scale to more esoteric subjects such as wormholes and time travel. In January 2007, Kaku visited Oman. While there, he talked at length to select members of that country's decision makers. In an interview with local media, Dr Kaku elaborated on his vision of mankind's future. Kaku considers climate change and terrorism as serious threats in man's evolution from a Type 0 civilization to Type 1.[15]
He is pictured in Symphony of Science's newest song (as of September 6, 2011), 'The Quantum World.'
On October 11, 2010, Michio Kaku appeared in the BBC program "What Happened Before the Big Bang" (along with Laura Mersini-Houghton, Andrei Linde, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, Neil Turok, and other notable cosmologists and physicists), where he propounded his theory of the universe created out of nothing.[16]
Social policy advocacy[link]
Kaku has publicly stated his concerns over matters including the anthropogenic cause of global warming, nuclear armament, nuclear power and the general misuse of science.[17] He was critical of the Cassini–Huygens space probe because of the 72 pounds (33 kg) of plutonium contained in the craft for use by its radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Conscious of the possibility of casualties if the probe's fuel were dispersed into the environment during a malfunction and crash as the probe was making a 'sling-shot' maneuver around earth, Kaku publicly criticized NASA's risk assessment.[18] He has also spoken on the dangers of space junk and called for more and better monitoring. Kaku is generally a vigorous supporter of the exploration of outer space, believing that the ultimate destiny of the human race may lie in extrasolar planets; but he is critical of some of the cost-ineffective missions and methods of NASA.
Kaku credits his anti-nuclear war position to programs he heard on the Pacifica Radio network, during his student years in California. It was during this period that he made the decision to turn away from a career developing the next generation of nuclear weapons in association with Edward Teller and focused on research, teaching, writing and media.[citation needed] Kaku joined with others such as Helen Caldicott, Jonathan Schell, Peace Action and was instrumental in building a global anti-nuclear weapons movement that arose in the 1980s, during the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
Kaku was a board member of Peace Action and on the board of radio station WBAI-FM in New York City where he originated his long running program, Explorations, that focused on the issues of science, war, peace and the environment.
His remark from an interview in support of SETI, "We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation...and we wouldn't even know.", is used in the third Symphony of Science installment "Our Place in the Cosmos".
Personal life[link]
Kaku is married to Shizue Kaku and has two daughters.[19]
Bibliography[link]
- Kaku, Michio; Trainer, Jennifer, eds. (1982). Nuclear Power: Both Sides. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-01631-5.
- Kaku, Michio; Daniel Axelrod (1987). To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans. Boston: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-321-7.
- Kaku, Michio (1993). Quantum Field Theory: A Modern Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507652-4.
- Kaku, Michio (1994). Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-286189-1.
- Kaku, Michio; Jennifer Trainer Thompson (1995). Beyond Einstein: Superstrings and the Quest for the Final Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-286196-4.
- Kaku, Michio (1999). Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory. New York: Springer. ISBN 0-387-98589-1.
- Kaku, Michio (1999). Strings, Conformal Fields, and M-Theory. New York: Springer. ISBN 0-387-98892-0.
- Kaku, Michio (1999). Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st century and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-288018-7.
- Kaku, Michio (2004). Einstein's Cosmos: How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-84755-4.
- Kaku, Michio (2004). Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9728-1.
- Kaku, Michio (2008). "M-Theory: The Mother of All Superstrings" in Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory. New York: Scriblerus. ISBN 978-0-9802114-0-5.
- Kaku, Michio (2008). Physics of the Impossible. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-52069-0.
- Kaku, Michio (2011). Physics of the Future: How Science will Shape Human Destiny and our Daily Lives by the Year 2100. New York: Doubleday. LCCN 2010026569.
References[link]
- ^ About Michio Kaku
- ^ Kaku, Michio. "Physics of the Impossible". pp 11. Doubleday. http://books.google.com/books?id=ube-MQcFFZQC&pg=PR11&lpg=PR11&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 9 July 2011.
- ^ Kaku, Michio (1994). Hyperspace: a scientific odyssey through parallel universes, time warps, and the tenth dimension. Oxford University Press US. pp. 146. ISBN 0-19-508514-0. http://books.google.com/?id=_HBtAHuG6dwC&pg=PA164&dq=%22michio+kaku%22+%22fort+benning%22#v=onepage&q=.
- ^ "Previous People". Institute for Advanced Study. http://www.sns.ias.edu/previous?group=physics.
- ^ Hua, Long; Michio Kaku (1994). "Non-polynomial closed string field theory". Thesis (Ph.D.) New York University: 107 p.. http://aleph.library.nyu.edu/F/FPCJXNMBBKHEUMTJ8C6HUB6JHPLVVQQF1ACVTACEPTM9P18S2N-00900?func=direct&doc_number=003142571&format=999.
- ^ "Physics Department". The City College of New York. http://www1.ccny.cuny.edu/prospective/science/profiles/Kaku-Profile.cfm.
- ^ "List of research papers in American Physical Society Journals". http://publish.aps.org/search/query?&offset=0&q%5Bclauses%5D%5B%5D%5Bvalue%5D=kaku+michio&q%5Bclauses%5D%5B%5D%5Boperator%5D=AND&q%5Bclauses%5D%5B%5D%5Bfield%5D=author&q%5Bper_page%5D=25.
- ^ Kaku, Michio; Michio Kaku and K. Kikkawa (15). "Field theory of relativistic strings. I. Trees". Physical Review D 10 (4): 1110–1133. Bibcode 1974PhRvD..10.1110K. DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.10.1110. http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v10/i4/p1110_1.
- ^ Kaku, Michio; Michio Kaku and K. Kikkawa (1974). "Field theory of relativistic strings. II. Loops and Pomerons". Phys. Rev. D. 1110 10 (6): 1823–1843. Bibcode 1974PhRvD..10.1823K. DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.10.1823. http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v10/i6/p1823_1.
- ^ a b "Notable books of 1994". The New York Times. December 4, 1994. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E7DA1630F937A35751C1A962958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=22. Retrieved 2010-09-20.
- ^ "Amazon.com: Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century (9780385484992): Michio Kaku: Books". amazon.com. 2011 [last update]. http://www.amazon.com/Visions-Science-Will-Revolutionize-Century/dp/0385484992. Retrieved 4 September 2011.
- ^ Kaku, Michio. "Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction 2005 – Longlist". Parallel Worlds. BBC. http://www.thesamueljohnsonprize.co.uk/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=81.
- ^ Michio Kaku (30 November 2007) (Audio). Universe, Energy & SETI. with Art Bell. Coast to Coast AM. http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2007/11/30.html. Retrieved 2008-02-27.
- ^ SCI-FI SCIENCE: Physics of the Impossible.
- ^ "The Upside Down World of Dr. Michio Kaku". BusinessToday Oman (Apex Press and Publishing). February 2007. http://www.apexstuff.com/bt/200702/cover.asp. Retrieved 2008-02-27.
- ^ "www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vdkmj". http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vdkmj.
- ^ Kaku, Michio (Summer 1992). "Nuclear Threats and the New World Order". CovertAction Quarterly 41 (2). http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/NthrtsNnwo.html. Retrieved 2008-02-27.
- ^ Kaku, Michio (5 October 1997). A Scientific Critique of the Accident Risks from the Cassini Space Mission. Animated Software Company. http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/mk9708so.htm. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
- ^ Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100. Michio Kaku. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011
External links[link]
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This audio file was created from a revision of the "Michio Kaku" article dated 2007-07-08, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio help)
- Official website
- Michio Kaku on Twitter
- Getting Physical: Dr. Michio Kaku Explains Einstein's Genius
- Russia Takes Aim at Asteroids, op-ed on asteroid defense, Wall St. Journal, Jan. 5, 2010
- The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe interview
- Michio Kaku at the Internet Movie Database
- Michio Kaku on National Public Radio
- About Michio Kaku
- Video: Michio Kaku discusses Physics of the Future on March 23, 2011, on Forum Network.
- In Depth interview with Kaku, October 3, 2010
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Kaku, Michio |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | American theoretical physicist |
| Date of birth | 1947-01-24 |
| Place of birth | San Jose, California, United States |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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