Assyriologist at Wolfson College (Oxford), writer plagued by self-doubt, lover of dead languages. I think we should all be doing what we can to save the planet.
The top part of this tablet is an inscription in the Sumerian language, dead for centuries by the time Balāṭa the junior scribe made this copy of it.
“You burn a good, smokeless fire. You remove the (glass) as soon as it (begins to) turn white. You cool it off and grind it down.” Several stages in the production of glass, as described in a broken clay tablet from the Library of Ashurbanipal. 
A receipt for "high quality dates...for his sacrifice" names a healer or physician named Rabâ-sha-Marduk.
Astronomers in ancient Assyria were sometimes exempt from performing the “ilku”, or tax in the form of labour, and that wasn’t always a good thing.
Beneath a long ramp or platform in the healing goddess’ temple precinct in ancient Isin, 33 dogs were laid to rest.
Although details of her early life are murky, she may have been adopted only to eventually be sold by her adoptive mother, Hammaya, into marriage.
there are a few places to look for early evidence of the wheel (or anything really), like…
A Babylonian scribal student practicing the sign "DINGIR" 𒀭 which looks like a star sometime between 2000 and 1600 BCE 
The monument that records Hammurabi's Laws is not the earliest collection of legal provisions.
“The moon was in 12° Aquarius. His days will be long.”
Possibly a Babylonian approximation of pi reflected in this drawing of a circle with inscribed numbers.
First of all, what even is cuneiform? 
A handful of clay tablets from Uruk, Babylon, and Borsippa in the middle of the first millennium BCE record contracts for doing laundry.
Nature was a clay tablet to the diviner in ancient Mesopotamia. The gods inscribed signs in astronomical phenomena, animal behaviour, plant life, oil, smoke, human physiology, dreams, and animal exta to be read by diviners.
The Akkadian word for comet is ṣallammû, or ṣallummû. It appears in cuneiform texts from ancient Babylonia that record centuries of observed astronomical phenomena. 
Work anxiety is nothing new. 
Ishtar, the later Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, had gender fluid characterstics. Ashurbanipal’s hymn to Ishtar of Nineveh compares her to the god Ashur.
It’s impossible to talk about any aspect of scholarship in ancient Mesopotamia, like astronomy, without first defining Mesopotamia and introducing the writing system used there for around 3,000 years, cuneiform.
This is a 4,000-year-old mud brick from the ziggurat in the ancient city of Ur in Iraq, stamped with a cuneiform inscription that mentions king Ur-Nammu.
A recipe from c1750 BCE for a vegetarian stew called pašrūtum, made from spring leeks, leeks, coriander, and garlic. Ground-up dried sourdough (bappiru) is added at the end to thicken the stew and deepen the flavour.
The walls of the ziggurat at Ur in the 1920s. Made of (millions of) air dried and baked mud bricks, the temple complex was dedicated to the moon god whose name is Nanna in Sumerian, Sîn in Akkadian.