The tablets are published in the journal Iraq by Abather Rahi Saadoon of Kerbala University, Noemi Borrelli of the University of Naples L’Orientale and Maurizio Viano of the University of Turin.

The tablets reached the Iraq Museum between 2005 and 2008

The tablets came to Baghdad through the Iraqi National Intelligence Service and the Ministry of Interior, which recover antiquities found inside Iraq or seized abroad with foreign authorities. All arrived between 2005 and 2008. Saadoon’s archival research dated each batch. One group was confiscated by the museum’s Technical Committee in 2006, others arrived in 2005 and 2007, and a final group was returned by the Jordanian authorities in 2008.

With no excavation record, the team placed each tablet by internal evidence such as names, month names and terminology. Two belong to the archives of Irisaĝrig, one comes from either Ur or Girsu, and the remaining twelve come from the Umma region.

Dating them is also difficult. Most carry ambiguous year names such as “the year Simurrum was destroyed” or “the year Ḫaršum was destroyed”, which could refer to several different years under the kings Šulgi and Ibbi-Suen.

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Proposed dates for the first people in the Americas span more than 100,000 years. The oldest claim rests on Cerutti in California, published in 2017 as a 130,000-year-old site. The youngest widely accepted site is Swan Point in Alaska, at about 14,200 years. A new review from the University of Kansas tests each position against the genomes of ancient Native Americans.

The review, by Bethany Potter, Savannah Hay, Archana Singh and Jennifer Raff of the university's anthropology department, appears in Current Opinion in Genetics & Development volume 101. Potter and Hay contributed equally.

The Clovis First model gave way to older sites

For much of the 20th century, the leading model linked North America’s first inhabitants to the Clovis culture, about 13,500 years old. In this view, people from northeast Asia crossed Beringia and entered the continent through an ice-free corridor near the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. Older sites found later suggested people may have arrived before that corridor opened.

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Egyptian soldiers carrying incense trees back from Punt, from the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, around 1470 BC. Credit: Σταύρος, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The lost continents of the last piece were invented in the nineteenth century, by a zoologist, a misread codex and a novelist’s imagination. Ancient writing is full of fabulous places too, lands of gods, eternal life and impossible wealth, and most of them have stayed on the page.

A few have not. Dilmun, Punt and Troy were each treated for a long time as places of legend, and each has since been found, or traced, on the map.

Dilmun was a paradise where no lion killed and no one fell ill

In the Sumerian myth of Enki and Ninhursag, Dilmun is a pure land at the beginning of things. The raven does not cry, the lion does not kill, the wolf does not take the lamb, and no one complains of a sick eye or an aching head. Enki, god of fresh water, makes sweet water rise from the ground to bring it to life.

In the Sumerian flood story the gods grant the survivor, Ziusudra, eternal life and settle him in the land of Dilmun, where the sun rises. For a Sumerian reader, Dilmun was where the world was new and where death could not reach.

It was also a place you could sail to. Around 2500 BC Ur-Nanshe, king of Lagash, recorded that ships of Dilmun brought him timber from foreign lands. Two centuries later Sargon of Akkad boasted that ships from Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha moored at the quay of his capital. Merchants’ archives from Ur list copper, pearls and goods bought through Dilmun’s traders.

Bahrain fits the myth down to its springs

In 1879 a British officer, Captain Edward Durand, found a basalt stone in a mosque on Bahrain carrying a cuneiform inscription that named Inzak, a god known from Mesopotamian texts as the lord of Dilmun. Henry Rawlinson, who had helped decipher cuneiform, identified Dilmun with Bahrain the following year.

The proof came with a Danish expedition that began work in 1953, led by P. V. Glob with Geoffrey Bibby, who told the story in Looking for Dilmun. They excavated the great tell at Qal’at al-Bahrain, a temple at Barbar, and hundreds of stamp seals in a distinctive local style.

Then there are the tombs. Between about 2200 and 1750 BC the island’s inhabitants built burial mounds on a scale found almost nowhere else. The 21 sites inscribed by UNESCO in 2019 hold some 11,774 of them, and the original total ran far higher. Among the largest are the royal mounds of A’ali, where inscribed stone vessels name a king, Yagli-El, servant of Inzak.

The geography even explains the theology. Bahrain is an island of fresh water in a salt sea, with springs that rise from the seabed offshore, and its Arabic name means two seas. A land where sweet water wells up from beneath the salt was a natural home for Enki’s paradise.

Punt was the Egyptian land of incense and gods

Punt appears in Egyptian records from the Old Kingdom onward. The Palermo Stone records an expedition under the pharaoh Sahure, around 2480 BC, that brought back tens of thousands of measures of myrrh. Egyptians sometimes called it Ta Netjer, the land of the god.

The most famous voyage belongs to Hatshepsut, around 1470 BC. Five ships sailed for Punt, and the reliefs in her temple at Deir el-Bahari show what they found. Houses raised on stilts among palm trees, incense trees dug up whole and carried in baskets to be replanted in Egypt, cattle, ebony, gold, panther skins and baboons. The ruler of Punt is named as Parahu, beside his wife Ati, carved with an unusually heavy body that has made her one of the most recognisable figures in Egyptian art.

For centuries the question was where any of this was. Proposals ranged from Arabia to Somalia to India.

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An Old Babylonian student exercise tablet with the name of the god Urash copied in repeated lines. Credit: Cuneiform tablet: student exercise tablet. Babylonian, Old Babylonian period. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 86.11.251.

The study, by Shana Zaia of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, was published online in the journal Iraq on 24 September 2026.

Schools met in teachers’ homes

Zaia’s starting point is that Babylonia had no separate subject called religion. Religious content ran through many genres and entered the curriculum according to how difficult each text was, so even schools located in temple complexes were not primarily religious institutions.

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An apkallu with cone and bucket, from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, ca. 883 to 859 BC. Apkallu-figure with Armlets, Assyrian, ca. 883–859 B.C.E. Gypsum stone, pigment. Brooklyn Museum, Purchased with funds given by Hagop Kevorkian and the Kevorkian Foundation, 55.145. Photo: Brooklyn Museum, CC BY.

Layard uncovered the reliefs at Nimrud in 1845

The story starts on the Tigris. Austen Henry Layard began excavating at Nimrud in November 1845, believing he had found Nineveh. The site was actually Kalhu, capital of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled from 883 to 859 BC. Layard’s two-volume Nineveh and Its Remains appeared in 1848 and 1849 and became an immediate bestseller.

Ashurnasirpal’s North-West Palace is the earliest surviving Assyrian royal residence, and its gateway figures and reliefs caused a sensation in the West when they were found. Ashurnasirpal was the first Assyrian king to decorate his palace extensively with carved stone, a practice his successors followed.

The winged figures are apkallu, protective sages

Museums that hold these reliefs identify the figures consistently. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge describes its winged man as an apkallu, meaning “sage”, one of several benevolent semi-divine beings believed to counsel and protect the Assyrian king. Images of apkallu were placed near the entrances to rooms in the palace to ward off evil spirits.

An eagle-headed apkallu with cone and bucket, from Ashurnasirpal II's palace at Nimrud, ca. 883 to 859 BC. Apkallu-figure, Assyrian, ca. 883–859 B.C.E. Gypsum stone, pigment. Brooklyn Museum, Purchased with funds given by Hagop Kevorkian and the Kevorkian Foundation, 55.149. Photo Credit: Brooklyn Museum

The Fitzwilliam’s figure holds a banduddu, a pail, and a mullilu, a sprinkler, from which he dispenses water for purification. He wears a horned crown, a sign of divine status. Apkallu appear in several forms. Some are winged men, some have eagle heads, and some wear a fish cloak.

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For perhaps thousands of years, local Cappadocians retreated underground when enemies approached. Their subterranean city was rediscovered by accident. Credit: Yasir999, CC BY-SA 4.0

A basement wall opened the site in 1963

The modern history of Derinkuyu begins with a house renovation. A resident’s work on his home in 1963 exposed a dark passage, the first of more than 600 entrances that open into the underground city from houses in the town. Türkiye’s Ministry of Culture gives the complex an approximate depth of 85 metres, with stables, cellars, dining halls, churches and a place for boiling molasses. It opened to visitors in 1965, and only about ten percent of it can be visited today.

Water was built into the design. A 55-meter ventilation shaft connected to the surface also served as a water well.

Published depths and level counts vary between sources

Popular accounts often describe Derinkuyu as 18 storeys deep and able to hold 20,000 people. Official and survey figures are more modest. Measured by its 52 ventilation shafts and wells, the depth ranges from 40 to 85 metres, and the eighth floor consists of a single small chamber with a ventilation shaft.

The most detailed independent mapping comes from Roberto Bixio of the Centro Studi Sotterranei in Genoa and Ali Yamaç of the OBRUK Cave Research Group in Istanbul. They describe a network beneath the modern town on at least five overlapping levels reaching about 45 meters, divided into radial sectors that are mostly inaccessible today under the masonry houses. The two best documented sectors alone contain more than 2.5 kilometres of passages, and the total is certainly much greater.

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Inscribed in Nippur around 1800 BC, this terracotta slab pairs eight botanical prescriptions for acute poisoning with ritual exorcisms. Ancient Babylonian practitioners treated plant-based remedies and spiritual defense as inseparable parts of the same cure. Image credit: Dr. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin / Museum of the Ancient Orient, Istanbul (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A dense slab of baked terracotta sits in the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul, inscribed with minute Cuneiform signs in Old Babylonian Akkadian. Excavated from the sacred city of Nippur in modern Iraq, the tablet dates back roughly 3,800 years. It details a systematic response to one of the ancient world’s most terrifying hazards: acute poisoning.

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