How societies evolved into fear-dominated goliaths – then collapsed
We think of ancient civilisations as operating very differently from the way our economy works today. Yet the Assyrians, around 3,000 years ago, began the basis of modern capitalism, in a region spanning most of modern-day Iraq, eastern Syria and southeastern Turkey.
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"Cuneiform writing, the oldest in the world, records evidence of credit, loans and debits as “virtual money” and the rise of elite merchants holding monopolies on trade. They traded Afghanistan tin from the city of Kanesh (in modern Turkey) throughout their empire, working as multinational corporations do today.
The Assyrian business community also had the first businesswomen and female investors. Generous tax breaks were given to merchants who promoted good business. The famous Code of Hammurabi reads like the fine print of a business deal, stating rules for granting credit and imposing taxes and tariffs on trade."
Excavators of Tel Hadid recently released the discovery of a unique seal stamp from the seventh century b.c.e., the time of Assyrian domination of the Levant.
Researchers from Iraq, the United Kingdom, and Sweden have launched a new Arabic-language platform for one of the world’s largest collections of cuneiform texts. The project gives Arabic speakers wider access to ancient records written thousands of years ago across Mesopotamia.
The results of a study show that scribes did not always refine their clay, barely used fire to harden the texts, and that tablets made in the workshop coexisted with others brought from outside.
Abbot Eliyo Atto, one of the founders of the Mor Ephrem monastery in Twente, the Netherlands, was a friend of young people, a brother to the elderly and a paternal teacher.
German police have arrested a 26-year-old man in connection with a fire that damaged the construction site of the Syriac Orthodox Church of St. Mary in Germany last weekend.
While today Tur Abdin stands as a symbol of historic endurance, it was once the epicenter of a remarkable, half-millennium-long ecclesiastical fracture that saw two rival Patriarchs claiming authority over the same flock.
Excavators of Tel Hadid recently released the discovery of a unique seal stamp from the seventh century b.c.e., the time of Assyrian domination of the Levant.
John Long
