sumerian

We've come a long way from the time when Ugg would mutter inanities to Uggetta in the cave, present her with a wad of crushed up flowers and move in for the kiss- and if she resisted he would reach for his club, gives it the old 'knock on the head and drag away' routine. Nowadays, for example, we do all the inanities on dating websites or in noisy bars. The rules of romance and courting have been shifting rapidly in the last 50 years and now many people are so clueless as to what they are supposed to do that they're paying experts to teach them how to make that connection. Our expectations from marriage and our relationships are also different. How much has the nature of what is perceived as 'romantic' changed from the past? How much do we even know about what brought people together thousands of years ago?

The average tourist will travel to the British Museum with a tick-list of treasures they're after. The Rosetta Stone, Elgin Marbles, Assyrian Lion Hunt, Lewis Chessmen and, for now at least, the Staffordshire Hoard will score highly on any visitor's I-spy scrapbook. Those hunting for Mesopotamian treasures will find themselves gravitating towards the magnificent monuments at the back end of the famous Egyptian Sculpture Gallery: Huge Assyrian winged bulls and Shalmaneser III's Black Obelisk are just two of the myriad important works on show.

Everyone makes them (some of us more compulsively than others): scribbled on post-it notes, or kept mentally in our imaginations – we all make lists. And we're not the only ones either; lists have been around for a long time – possibly since the first writing systems and certainly since Sumerian scribes began to keep accounts in the fourth millennium BC in Mesopotamia. So what is it about the beauty of a list – its numerical order, hierarchy, completeness – that makes them such a part of how we like to categorise, order and understand the world?

Three men have been arrested in Iraq on charges of trafficking eight priceless ancient artefacts, as the war-torn nation clamps down on a burgeoning black market. The men were foiled after trying to sell one item for $160,000 to an undercover intelligence officer of the Iraq Army 12th Division, just outside the northern city of Kirkuk. A fourth trafficker is yet to have been caught by the police. Among the treasures was the bust of a Sumerian king, local army chiefs told Associated Press. All of the objects date from the region's Sumerian era, between 4,000 and 2,000 BC. Major General Abdul Amir al-Zaidi told reporters the sting was based on information from local residents, and stressed the Iraqi authorities' commitment to retrieving vital artefacts in the face of civil unrest: "The duty of Iraqi army is not only to chase the terrorists but also to protect state treasures," he said.

Penn Museum’s world-renowned Mesopotamian Collection from Ur is the centrepiece of a new long-term exhibition exploring Iraq’s Ancient Cultural Heritage that opens October 25th. The exhibition will contain field notes of previous expeditions to the region, photographs, archival documents as well as more than 220 extraordinary ancient artefacts unearthed at the excavation. Famous artefacts such as the Ram-Caught-in-the-Thicket, the Great Lyre with a gold and lapis lazuli bull's head, and  Queen Puabi's jewelry, as well as her headdress and other treasures, will be on display at 'Iraq's Ancient Past: Rediscovering Ur's Royal Cemetery'.