Introduction : becoming art -- The search for Origins : Mesopotamia and the cradle of civilization -- Uruk : the arts of civilization -- Early Dynastic Sumer : images for people, temples for gods -- ...

THE great and inventive people who settled 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates (now part of Iraq), founded one of the world’s first major civilizations.

An Akkadian cylinder seal, circa 2350-2150 B.C.E., depicts a contest scene. The image on the right shows the impression the seal would make. Gift of Nanette B. Kelekian, in memory of Charles Dikran ...

Assyrian cylinder seal from the late ninth to seventh centuries B.C.E., made of chalcedony and inscribed with a cultic scene. The image on the right shows the impression the seal would make. Gift of ...

When New Art’s Really Old: From the Valley of the Kings to Pompeii to a Rubens in a Paris Closet Wall Panel with a Striding Lion, neo-Babylonian period 605–562 B.C. Glazed brick. Object: H: 99.7 × W: ...

About 4,500 years ago, an image of the Sumerian storm god Ningirsu was engraved on a silver vessel now on view in the Getty Villa Museum exhibition “Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins.” ...

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In ancient times, Mesopotamia, meaning 'land between two rivers', was a vast region that lay between the Tigris and Euphrates river systems, and it is where civilization emerged over 7,000 years ago.

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Mesopotamians, the ancient inhabitants of the land between the Euphrates and Tigris ...