Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection, through June 30, 2020, at the Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticutt

Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection, through June 30, 2020, at the Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticutt.
Ancient Mesopotamia, known as the “Land Between the Rivers” and located in what is now Iraq and Syria, was the birthplace of writing, urban culture, the state, and many other concepts and institutions that shape our world to this day. It produced intriguing works of art, myths and epics celebrating gods and heroes, and treatises on mathematics, medicine, and astronomy. This exhibit features 150 artifacts including original pieces, images, and translations dating from the mid-4th millennium BCE to the 1st century CE. Among the items on view are an early account of the heroic king Gilgamesh campaigning to the Cedar Forest to slay the monster Huwawa; tablets with poems by the first named author in human history, the princess Enheduanna; the world’s oldest cookbooks with 4,000-year-old recipes; and astronomy tablets with the earliest prose descriptions of the celestial constellations.


Image: Tablets with recipes for various types of stews, soups, and pies dating back to the early second millennium are the earliest written recipes in history. Image courtesy of Klaus Wagensonner.

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