Cats have enjoyed a long-standing position of reverence and esteem across various cultures around the world. In the ancient ...

“But the archaeological evidence shows very strong local traditions that are clearly not in communication with each other, persisting for centuries if not millennia.” The ancient genomic sequences, ...

An ancient oceanic plate under modern-day Iraq is breaking off horizontally, researchers have shown in a new study. This huge ...

The famous biblical book alludes to God only once. Historically, though, most interpreters have argued the poem’s about love between the divine and his people.

Ancient Near East studies examines the history, languages and cultures of the Near East from the beginning of recorded history to the Roman times (approximately from 3000 BCE to 200 CE). Even though ...

A century ago, UChicago scholars argued a controversial idea: Western civilization had its roots in the ancient Middle East—not in Greece or Rome. Today, scholars at the OI and across the University ...

A small but revolutionary group pursued a new idea: That civilization began in the ancient Middle East. In 1919, Breasted founded the Oriental Institute (OI), kicking off a century of archaeology and ...

An ancient oceanic plate under modern-day Iraq ... Some of the most dramatic changes over recent times can be found along the East African Rift System (EARS), one of the largest rifts in the ...

Dr. Jonathan Valk (Ph.D., New York University) is a historian of the ancient Middle East. He specializes in the history of Assyria in the first and second millennia BCE, a region at the intersection ...