Before the recent Girsu excavations, the knowledge and functioning of the Akkadian Empire were poorly understood. The recent discovery of tablets is highly important because it provides the first ...

These clay records are incredibly detailed, showing fierce governmental oversight by the Akkadian Empire. “They note absolutely everything down,” Rey tells the Observer. “If a sheep dies at ...

Archaeologists from the British Museum and Iraq have uncovered over 200 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets at Girsu, shedding ...

Some artefacts found at the site—on a mound known as Tablet Hill—also reveal, Rey says, a standard metric system, the Akkad-gur, used across the empire to measure quantities of resources such ...

This story appears in the April 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine. The world's first empire, known as Akkad, was founded some 4,300 years ago, between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers.

This page introduces a new way of exploring lexical semantics in Akkadian. How to cite this portal: Heidi Jauhiainen, Aleksi Sahala, Tero Alstola, Sam Hardwick, Tommi Jauhiainen, Krister Lindén and ...