Timeline
Every guide, in its time.
Read across eras and regions, then open a guide to see the sources behind its dates. A shared date is a question to investigate, not evidence of contact.
8 of 57 guides in Mesopotamia
Before 5000 BCE 1
- 5300–4100 BCE
What comes before a city?
Ubaid: the villages before the first cities.
Southern Mesopotamia, Iraq · Mesopotamia · Early cities
Meet the Ubaid period of Mesopotamia and see why one research record keeps two different date ranges side by side instead of averaging them.
5000–3000 BCE 1
- 4000–3100 BCE
Where does the first city begin?
Uruk: reading the first urban horizon.
Southern Mesopotamia, Iraq · Mesopotamia · Early cities
Follow the Uruk period in southern Mesopotamia, where monumental architecture, administration, and early writing appear, and learn to read a period's dates as approximate.
3000–1000 BCE 3
- 2900–2350 BCE
Who decided when a period begins?
Early Dynastic Sumer: how a period gets its subdivisions.
Diyala region and southern Mesopotamia, Iraq · Mesopotamia · Kingdoms & monuments
Use the Square Temple at Tell Asmar to see how the Early Dynastic period of Mesopotamia was constructed by archaeologists, and why its subdivisions are debated.
- 2000–1600 BCE
How good was a Babylonian approximation?
YBC 7289: the square root of two on a school tablet.
Mesopotamia (provenance unknown) · Mesopotamia · Mathematics & measurement
A small round clay tablet from the Old Babylonian period shows a square with its diagonals and a number close to the square root of two. Read the numbers as a scribe would.
- 1800 BCE
What is a table of numbers for?
Plimpton 322: a Babylonian table and its interpreters.
Mesopotamia · Mesopotamia · Mathematics & measurement
Meet a clay tablet from around 1800 BCE whose columns of numbers have been read in several ways. Separate the object from the interpretations.
1000 BCE – 1 CE 3
- 1000–500 BCE
How do you catalogue the sky in clay?
MUL.APIN: a Babylonian compendium of the sky.
Mesopotamia · Mesopotamia · Astronomy & calendars
Read the British Museum's record for the first tablet of MUL.APIN, a Late Babylonian astronomical treatise, and see how a copy's date differs from a tradition's age.
- 700–601 BCE
How did Assyrian scribes divide?
K.2069: a reciprocal table from the library at Nineveh.
Kouyunjik, Nineveh, Iraq · Mesopotamia · Mathematics & measurement
A seventh-century tablet from Nineveh lists reciprocals for sexagesimal arithmetic. Learn why the date of an artifact is not the date of the mathematics on it.
- 652–651 BCE
What did someone see in 652 BCE?
Astronomical Diaries: a dated record of the Babylonian sky.
Babylon · Mesopotamia · Astronomy & calendars
Enter the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries through a single tablet, BM 32312, and learn why a dated observation is kept apart from what it was taken to mean.
Keep the habit
Dates are ranges. Read them that way.
Each guide names its period, its place, and the records that support them.
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