Middle East
The cradle of civilisation, told through its surviving objects. Cuneiform tablets, Assyrian palace reliefs, the Standard of Ur, and the Royal Game of Ur — spanning Mesopotamia, Persia, and the ancient Near East.
Where writing, cities, and law were invented — and written down.
he flat land between two rivers produced the first cities, the first code of law, the first epic — and the first writing, pressed into wet clay with a reed. Because clay survives where paper rots, the everyday record of the ancient world endures here in astonishing quantity.
Stand before the Assyrian palace reliefs, their lions and armies carved to overawe; then turn to the Standard of Ur and the Royal Game of Ur, and find a civilization that also played, traded, and kept its accounts. The cradle, recorded in its own hand.
