2Nd Millennium BC

Reading time: 15-20 minutes If you like languages, you've probably heard the terms Romance and the Romance family. Although it started life as a name for the language of medieval France, Roma…

A seven-word inscription discovered by accident on a 3,700-year-old lice comb is the oldest known sentence written in an alphabet, according to a new study.

One of the largest volcanic eruptions in the Holocene epoch—as measured by the volume of material ejected—occurred on the Greek island of Santorini, traditionally known as Thera. It is considered a pivotal event in the prehistory of the Aegean and East Mediterranean region, with the city of Akrotiri, buried some 1,600 years before Pompeii, becoming one of the key archaeological sites of the second millennium BCE.…

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This tiny 4,000-year-old cuneiform tells a big story about past civilizations.

Archaeologists discovered a royal seal from the ancient Hittite Empire that warns of death if a contract is broken.

In 1914, two beads were found under the great ziggurat of Aššur in Iraq, in a foundation deposit dating from around 1800-1750 BC. Their material has now been identified as amber using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR). The beads represent some of the earliest amber specimens in southwest Asia and also some of the most distant discoveries from the find areas in the Baltic region.

Archaeologists hope to settle one of modern archaeology's longstanding disputes: the date of a volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Santorini, traditionally known as Thera.

Hunter-gatherer metallurgy in the Early Iron Age of Northern Fennoscandia - Volume 95 Issue 384

Elevated temple platforms exist worldwide. On the flood plains of Mesopotamia, ancient peoples built artificial divine mountains that represent human ascent to the world of the gods.

According to an organic residue analysis performed on 10 copper-alloy daggers from Pragatto, a Bronze Age domestic site (1550-1250 BCE) in northern Italy, these artifacts were used for processing animal carcasses and not as non-functional symbols of identity and status, as previously thought.

New discoveries challenge old ideas about the earliest alphabets.

The site was occupied throughout much of the Neolithic period and contains dozens of ancient burials and artifacts.

The alphabet was invented around 1800 BCE and was used by the Canaanites and later by most other languages in the world. Until recently, no meaningful Canaanite inscriptions had been discovered in the Land of Israel, save only two or three words here and there. Now an amazing discovery presents an entire sentence in Canaanite, dating to about 1700 BCE. It is engraved on a small ivory comb and includes a spell…

Babylon is known for Hammurabi's laws and its hanging gardens.

Recently, a few Twitterati have invoked Littauer and Crouwel (1996) to assert that Sintashta-Petrovka spoked two-wheeled vehicles cannot be "true chariots". They were explicit about those scholars…

A bold reassessment of what caused the Late Bronze Age collapse

Extreme drought in Iraq have given German and Kurdish archaeologists the unique chance to examine an ancient Bronze Age city, Zachiku. It was a race against the clock.

Southern Arc vs Steppe vs Anatolian Farmer

How should we live when we know we must die? This question is posed by the first work of world literature, the Gilgamesh epic. More than 4,000 years ago, Gilgamesh set out on a quest for immortality. Like all Babylonian literature, the saga has survived only in fragments. Nevertheless, scholars have managed to bring two-thirds of the text into readable condition since it was rediscovered in the 19th century.