In Lord Byron’s 1821 play “Sardanapalus,” the king of the title laments that the glory of his empire will someday fade into oblivion. “Time shall quench full many a people’s records, and a hero’s acts ...

A relief-drawing from the Palace of Sennacherib, Nimroud, Nineveh. (Wikimedia Commons TYalaA CC BY-SA 4.0) The first mention of Assyria by ancient Greeks was in the middle of the 7th century BC, ...

More than 2,500 years ago, the Assyrians in Nineveh built the first great empire in human history. Excelling in science, engineering and warfare, they were the beginnings of modern civilization. But ...

For centuries, the Phoenician city-states survived conquest after conquest, bending but never quite breaking beneath the weight of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. But when Alexander the Great arrived at ...

Archaeologists in Jerusalem have uncovered an ancient Assyrian inscription that may shed light on historical events described in the Old Testament. The discovery, a tiny 2.5-centimeter pottery shard ...

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 ...