If you’re someone like me who sometimes has a difficult time picturing ancient history, here are some of my favorite and accurate artistic representations/photos of mesopotamia

This drawing is my favorite of all time, it shows the ancient citadel of Dūr Šarru kîn, the capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire under King Sargon II (Loud and Altman 1938)

Here’s another artistic reconstruction of the palace complex from the Oriental Institute of Chicago:

Architect Félix Thomas’ reconstruction of the gates of Dūr Šarru Kîn (right), pictured here next to the rebuilt Nergal Gate in Nineveh (left)

This is a 4,000 year old street from the ancient city of Ur, pictured here with Arab workers holding pottery of the 2nd millennium. This may not be too far off from what a Sumerian city could have resembled!

an artist’s drawing of domestic life of prehistoric peoples living in modern day Jordan (Eric Carlson)

The ruins of the Ziggurat of Babylon in 1920, compared to a plaster reconstruction of the 7-story structure by German assyriologist Eckhard Unger

Peggy Sanders’ (1982) painting of the East Mound of Nippur, compared to a photo of the real mound, taken by John Sanders (1974)

a reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, now in the Pergamon, Berlin

these images, excluding the image of the ishtar gate, were taken from the Oriental Insitute’s publication “Picturing the Past,” (2012) by Jack Green, Emily Teeter, and John A. Larson; one of my all time favorites they’ve published (it’s not all bad in the world of archaeology!)

I have a lot of photos like this! I’m hoping to save some to keep posting for the future haha

for those looking for more photos like this from across the ancient near east, you can also download the publication here: https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/publications/oimp/oimp-34-picturing-past-imaging-and-imagining-ancient-middle-east