Ancient Middle East

In southern Iraq, a crushing silence hangs over the dunes. For nearly 5,000 years, the sands of the Iraqi desert have held the remains of the oldest known civilization: the Sumerians. When American archaeologists discovered a collection of cuneiform tablets in Iraq in the late 19th century, they were confronted with a language and a people who were at the time only scarcely known to even the most knowledgeable scholars of ancient Mesopotamia.

The gods of Ancient Egypt conjure up images of hieroglyphs with animal-headed people, fantastic civilizations, and a past that seems both unimaginably distant and still tenuously connected to the present day. Although the names Ra, Anubis, and Isis still linger today in modern fiction, the truth about these gods reveals the ancient Egyptians themselves. A look at the principal gods of Ancient Egypt gives insight into the culture of the world's first great civilization.

Nineveh was an age-old Assyrian city in Upper Mesopotamia, near Mosul in modern-day Northern Iraq. It was the capital and biggest city of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and the world's biggest city for some decades, and is on the eastern bank of the Tigris River. It's now a prevalent name for the portion of Mosul that's on the Tigris' eastern bank, and it is also the name of the nation's Nineveh Governorate. It was the world's largest city for about 50 years till it was sacked by a union of its previous subject tribes.