Pharaohs and Assyrians

The beginnings of archaeology lie not only in a quest to satisfy curiosity about the past through cultured collecting and leisured antiquarianism, but also in a search for the world’s earliest civilizations, which continued throughout the nineteenth century. In this chapter, we describe how this search began, along the Nile and in Mesopotamia (Greek: “the land between the rivers”), the legendary site of the biblical Garden of Eden.