The Hittites used Mesopotamian cuneiform letters. Archaeological expeditions to Hattusa have discovered entire sets of royal archives in cuneiform tablets, written either in the Semitic Mesopotamian A ...
The Elamites called their country Haltamti, Sumerian ELAM, Akkadian Elam?, female Elamītu "resident of Susiana, Elamite". Additionally, it is known as Elam in the Hebrew Bible, where they are called ...
The term Levant, which first appeared in English in 1497, originally meant the East in general or "Mediterranean lands east of Italy". It is borrowed from the French levant 'rising', that is, the poin ...
The term "Fertile Crescent" was popularized by University of Chicago archaeologist James Henry Breasted, beginning with his high school textbooks Outlines of European History in 1914 and Ancient Time ...
Pharaoh, meaning "Great House", originally referred to the king's palace, but during the reign of Thutmose III (ca. 1479–1425 BC) in the New Kingdom, after the foreign rule of the Hyksos during the S ...
In the ancient Egyptian language, the Nile is called ?'pī or Iteru, meaning "river", represented by the hieroglyphs shown on the left (literally itrw, and 'waters' determinative). In Coptic, the wor ...
Assyrians claim that they are the descendants of the peoples that created the great Semitic civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia that absorbed the early Sumerian civilisation, in particular Assyria, A ...
During the third millennium BC, there had developed an intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadia ...
The precise archaeological site of the city-state of Akkad has not yet been found. The form Agade appears in Sumerian, for example in the Sumerian King List; the later Assyro-Babylonian form Akkad? ( ...
The term "Sumerian" is the common name given to the ancient non-Semitic inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Sumer, by the Semitic Akkadians. The Sumerians referred to themselves as ù? sa? gíg-ga (cuneifor ...
The concept 'cradle of civilization' is the subject of much debate. The figurative use of cradle to mean "the place or region in which anything is nurtured or sheltered in its earlier stage" is traced ...
The Arabic name ?????? al-?Irāq has been in use since before the 6th century. There are several suggested origins for the name. One dates to the Sumerian city of Uruk (Biblical Hebrew Erech) a ...
The regional toponym Mesopotamia comes from the ancient Greek root words μ?σο? (meso) "middle" and ποταμ?? (potamia) "river" and literally means "(Land) between rivers". It is used through ...
The term "Sumerian" is the common name given to the ancient non-Semitic inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Sumer, by the Semitic Akkadians. The Sumerians referred to themselves as ù? sa? gíg-ga (cuneifor ...
Estimation of absolute dates becomes possible for the 2nd half of the 3rd millennium BC. For the first half of the 3rd millennium, only very rough chronological matching of archaeological dates with w ...
