Art Beneath the Sand

Most of Mesopotamia is still unexcavated, and museums hold crates of tablets and carvings no one has fully studied. The next big discovery may already be sitting on a shelf.

For comparison, in nearby Turkey the carved stone pillars of Göbekli Tepe predate Mesopotamia's cities by thousands of years. They are not part of this tradition, but they hint that the urge to carve meaning into stone is even older than the first cities.