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The round stone mound in this photo—a Canaanite outdoor altar—is also referred to as a 'high place'. It was built around 2,700 BCE and used up to around 1,800 BCE. A 'high place' ('bamah' in the Hebrew Bible) was a place used for worship, in part…

Writing was invented in southern Mesopotamia, in the ancient kingdom of Sumer, sometime before 3,000 BCE. Cuneiform, the type of writing seen in column 6 of this slide, was a development from earlier 'logographic' writing, in which signs stood for…

The Sumerian King List is the name given to a traditional canon of the early kings of Mesopotamia, thought by some scholars to have been composed in the time of Utu-hegal, a king of the city of Uruk who restored Sumerian independence after the…

The earliest writing was not on paper, but on clay tablets. Instead of a pen, scribes used an instrument called a stylus that was triangular in cross-section. They would press the tip of the stylus into the clay to make the triangular portions of the…

This photograph shows some common every-day pottery from the Early Bronze Age (3,300-2,000 BCE). Because archaeologists find more pottery sherds than anything else in an excavation, it is the main source of information for dating the architecture of…

This photograph of one of the many the Early Bronze Age towers at Arad reveals defenses typical of the period. The towers, 10-12 feet in diameter and found at 65-80 foot intervals, projected out from the wall, thus exposing any attacker attempting to…