The land between the Nile and the Indus saw the first cities, the first writing and the first empires. These articles cover Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Levant and Persia, from Uruk and Akkad to the powers that fought over the same rivers for three thousand years.
Solecki's 1951 to 1960 trench at Shanidar Cave held 10 Neanderthals. In 2020 a Cambridge-led team reported an adult buried in a pit dug beside Shanidar 4.
· 60,000 BCA Natufian woman of about 45 was buried at Hilazon Tachtit, Galilee, 12,400–12,000 cal BP, with over 50 tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis and a human foot.
· 10,000 BCHunter-gatherers raised Göbekli Tepe's T-pillar rings about 9500 BC, before farming reached the region. Excavators now call it a settlement with rituals.
· 9500 BCKathleen Kenyon found an 8.2-meter stone tower at Jericho in the 1950s. Four named scholars still give four different reasons for why it was built.
· 8000 BCÇatalhöyük's East Mound, 13 hectares on Turkey's Konya plain, held roof-entered mudbrick houses with the dead under the floors, about 7100 to 5950 BC.
· 7100 BCLime-plaster statues on reed frames, buried in two pits at 'Ain Ghazal near Amman and lifted in 1983 and 1985, then conserved in London and Washington.
· 6750 BCGermany's archaeological institute calls Uruk one of the world's earliest metropolises: 200 hectares, perhaps 40,000 people, writing from about 3300 BC.
· 3300 BCIn 1975 Sapienza excavators found Ebla's palace archive at Tell Mardikh, Syria. Scarpa counts over 15,000 pieces in one room, ASOR over 18,000 tablets.
· 2300 BCSargon's daughter Enheduanna, priestess at Ur, names herself in the Exaltation of Inana. Most copies are 500 years later, so her authorship is debated.
· 2300 BCSargon's inscriptions say he captured Lugalzagesi of Uruk and took lands from the sea to Mari and Ebla. Three later tales disagree on where he came from.
· 2279 BCA copper statue from Bassetki says Naram-Sin won nine battles in a year, and the people of Agade asked eight gods to make him their city's god.
· 2250 BCSeveral editions of the Gilgamesh epic existed by about 2000 BC. A king of Uruk loses his friend Enkidu, seeks eternal life and loses the plant of youth.
· 2000 BCEgypt's text of the peace between Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III is dated year 21. The UN gives 1269 BC, Livius.org about 1259 BC.
· 1259 BCIn May 1929 Claude Schaeffer found alphabetic cuneiform tablets at Ras Shamra, Syria. In 1930 Hans Bauer read about 20 of their 26 or 27 signs.
· 1190 BCMerneptah's Karnak inscription and Ramesses III's year 8 text at Medinet Habu name the Sea Peoples. Breasted, Cline and Roberts added the rest.
· 1177 BCHormuzd Rassam dug the Cyrus Cylinder out of Babylon in 1879. The British Museum reads it as a building text; in 1971 it became a human rights symbol.
· 539 BCDarius I cut the Achaemenid empire into tax districts, linked them with a road of 111 stations and relay couriers, and paid in gold darics.
· 500 BCJohann Ludwig Burckhardt entered the valley of Petra on August 22, 1812, after telling his guide he had vowed to sacrifice a goat at the tomb of Aaron.
· AD 100Wall paintings found in a trench in March 1920 led to the Yale-Académie digs at Dura-Europos; its synagogue went to Damascus, its baptistery to Yale.
· AD 245Shapur I took Valerian prisoner near Edessa in AD 260 and recorded it in a trilingual inscription and rock reliefs in Fars. Rome told it differently.
· AD 260Palmyra taxed the caravans carrying Gulf and Indian goods across the desert to Rome. That wealth let Odaenathus and Zenobia rule the Roman East until AD 272.
· AD 270From 762 to 833 the Abbasid caliphs paid translators in Baghdad to turn Greek, Persian and Indian works of medicine, astronomy and mathematics into Arabic.
· AD 830In 1896–97 Solomon Schechter emptied the Ben Ezra Synagogue's geniza in Fustat. Cambridge counts 193,000 fragments, Bible leaves to a Maimonides letter.
· 1100Rukn al-Din Khurshah surrendered to Hülegü on November 19, 1256. Juvayni, Hülegü's secretary, then sorted the Alamut library, keeping some books and burning the rest.
· 1256
