New research reveals Sumer’s cities may have risen with the tides, rewriting the origin story of the world’s first ...

A study reveals that Sumer, the cradle of civilization, rose because of natural tidal irrigation that shaped the world’s ...

A recently published study in PLOS ONE is reshaping scientific understanding of the rise of urban civilization in ancient ...

Many millennia ago, the tides turned for ancient Sumerians who built the first civilization - literally. Rising in southern Mesopotamia around 6,000 years ago, Sumer bridged a network of city-states ...

A recent study is changing the understanding of how urbanization developed in ancient Mesopotamia. According to the analysis, the emergence of the Sumerian civilization was not only the result of ...

New research shows that the rise of Sumer was deeply tied to the tidal and sedimentary dynamics of ancient Mesopotamia. Early communities harnessed predictable tides for irrigation, but when deltas ...

Learn how the first civilization in Mesopotamia depended on tides and how it responded when faced with a major environmental challenge. Jack Knudson is an assistant editor for Discover Magazine who ...