The royal cemetery of Ur: exhibition

For those of you who can't make it to the University of Pennsylvania on 30th April for the grand re-opening of the Penn Museum's "Iraq's ancient past" exhibition focusing on the discovery and excavation of the royal cemetery of Ur by C. Leonard Woolley in the 1920's, here's a link to the Museum's website for all the historical background and pictures of some of the treasures, including the famous bull-headed harp and the spectacular jewelery of Lady Pu-abi   
Archaeology website Past Horizons also discusses "Iraq's ancient past", with more photographs of the exhibits and of the excavations at Ur.

Mesopotamian mathematics: cuneiform slideshow

Slideshow from the New York Times website of 13 cuneiform clay tablets dating from 1900 to 1700 BC from an exhibition at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Many of these are exercises by students studying to be scribes who were learning mathematics based on the extinct Sumerian language


For more background on the exhibition and the tablets, go to artdaily.org and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World's own website

"Visible language" - exhibition and book

New York Times article on the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago's latest exhibition "Visible language : inventions of writing in the ancient Middle East and beyond" - looking at the evolution of writing in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica.

The "book of the exhibition" is on order for SOAS Library, but it is already available as a free open-access text. Go to the library catalogue entry and click on the link to download and view this book.