Independent research archive Texts · Ideas · Civilizations
Selected readings
Hammurabi and the Covenant Code: parallels and the limits of borrowing
What happens when an ox kills someone, or an enslaved person’s eye is injured? Reading Hammurabi and Exodus 21 to explain parallels, differences and possible legal transmission.
An inscribed face of Hammurabi’s stele, Louvre SB 8, eighteenth century BCE. This photograph shows cuneiform, not the upper king-and-Shamash relief. Photograph: Rama; CC BY-SA 3.0 France
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Original photograph
Göbekli Tepe’s T-Shaped Pillars: Humans, Ancestors or Gods?
Hands, dress, abstraction and the central pair: what do Göbekli Tepe’s pillars establish about human form, and what remains open about ancestors and gods? With Urfa Man and the 2025 Karahantepe announcement.
A carved arm beside a fox relief on a pillar in Building D at Göbekli Tepe, photographed in 2019. Human and animal features occur together; the photograph does not establish a divine identity
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Original photograph
The Natufians: What Happened to Religion When People Began to Settle?
Houses, graves, ornaments, feasts and place memory before fully developed agriculture: Natufian evidence and its limits for reconstructing rituals, ancestors and gods.
Aerial view of Shubayqa 1, northeast Jordan, Figure 1 in Richter et al. (2017), with a location map. Natufian architecture; no specific religious function is established
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Dilmun and Eden: Was the “Sumerian Paradise” the Source of Genesis’s Garden?
A close comparison of Enki and Ninhursaga with Genesis 2–3: water, plants, Ninti and the rib, the name Eden, historic Dilmun and the limits of a borrowing claim.
Modern conceptual illustration combining a Dilmun-like quay, fresh water and a garden to frame the comparison; neither an archaeological reconstruction nor a location of Eden. © IL Archive, CC0
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Illustration
Qumran
Between stability and plurality: Qumran witnesses, MT, shorter Jeremiah, harmonistic Torah and the Septuagint’s Hebrew source, with limits of copy dating and reconstruction.
Qumran site remains in a modern photograph. Context for the manuscripts, not Cave 4 or a Jeremiah fragment. Original preserved; display resized without cropping
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Original photograph
New in the archive
Ninth-century North African Qur'an folio with Sura 54:13–27. It illustrates later manuscript transmission, not Dhul Qarnayn's passage or Marianna Klar. Cleveland Museum of Art, 1993.39.2.a
Scholar of Quranic narrative in its late-antique literary contexts.
Original diagram of two models discussed in Kara’s study: direct dependence between texts (01) or a shared narrative milieu feeding two versions (02). The arrows are hypothetical, not evidence of a documented transfer
Author of a 2026 study comparing Dhul Qarnayn with the Syriac Alexander tradition.
A Persian scene of Alexander building the wall, dated 1481. It is a later witness to the story, not the Syriac text studied by van Bladel or his portrait. Walters Art Museum, W.604.315A
Philologist and historian of the Near East and the transmission of learning across languages.
Gold stater issued in the name of Lysimachus, 286–281 BCE; the horned head is Alexander, not Lysimachus. The Met, 52.127.4
A successor of Alexander who ruled Thrace; his coins showed Alexander with Ammon’s horn.
Tangier and its port from the sea, 18 September 2008; a modern city view, not a confirmed location of Moses' story
City in northern Morocco by the Strait of Gibraltar, proposed in one interpretation of the Quran's meeting of the seas.
Gold solidus of 629–631 CE bearing official representations of Heraclius and his son Heraclius Constantine; a Byzantine coin, not a photographic likeness
Byzantine emperor who ruled 610–641 CE; his victory over Persia informs dating proposals for some Syriac Alexander texts.
British Egyptologist and ancient-language scholar (1857–1934) who published a historical English translation of Syriac Alexander texts.
Scholar of the history of religion and early Islamic exegesis.
IllustrationStudy
A story and its surviving manuscript may be centuries apart. Examples from Sargon, the flood, Enoch and the Qur'an explain how we date each stage.
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How do Illuyanka, Baal and Zeus–Typhon battles resemble one another? Hittite, Ugaritic and Greek accounts, dated witnesses, stolen body parts and possible paths of contact.
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IllustrationStudy
The Hittite Kumarbi song and Hesiod’s Kronos–Zeus narrative: succession, swallowing and birth, the dates of damaged witnesses, and possible routes of story circulation.
Original photographStudy
Councils of El, Baal and Zeus: how feasts, messengers and decisions move Ugaritic and Homeric stories, and what chronology and Phoenician–Greek contact help explain.
Original photographStudy
How does Abraham's sacrifice story differ between Genesis and the Qur'an? A historical comparison of Jewish, Christian and Islamic retellings of the son, his rescue and the animal substitute.
AI-generatedStudy
Leader, land, nations and barrier: Genesis, Ezekiel and Revelation through Alexander, the Quran and hadith, with Gyges, Marduk and witness dates examined.
From the artifact collection
A fragmentary Aramaic witness, probably from the later fifth century BCE, preserving Ahiqar’s tale and sayings with gaps and editorial restorations.
Illustration · CC0 · Modern editorial illustration: IL Archive / CC0
Image and object details →اقرأ Text مع موارده
A large rabbinic compilation in Hebrew and Aramaic, formed in Mesopotamia through stages; its final redaction remains debated.
افتح Text وموارد Line →Many paths to knowledge
Follow a period, discover a place, or explore a name and an idea.
Path images are generated illustrations.
Our method
Trace the evidence, levels of certainty, and different readings. Consult the revision history as knowledge changes.
How we work →Research history →
