Curious places in Iraq

2,000-year-old clay jars containing copper cylinders and iron rods. When filled with acidic juice, they generate 1.1 volts. Whether Parthians actually used them as batteries remains debated. Skeptics insist they're just storage vessels.

Clay tablets from 3200 BCE bearing the world's earliest known writing - pictographic symbols that would evolve into cuneiform. These first texts weren't poetry or prayers but accounting records: lists of barley, beer, and livestock. Bureaucracy, not literature, drove the invention of writing.

7,000-year-old clay statues depicting humanoid figures with elongated heads and lizard-like eyes. No one knows what they represent or why all were deliberately broken.

A cuneiform text listing rulers who reigned for tens of thousands of years before 'the flood swept over'. Then lifespans abruptly become normal. The transition from myth to history happens mid-document. Where fantasy ends and fact begins is still debated.

A meter-tall alabaster vessel from 3200 BCE depicting humanity's earliest known visual narrative. Priests bring offerings to a goddess in sequential panels read bottom to top. Looted in 2003, it was returned in 14 pieces three months later.

A Neanderthal burial surrounded by pollen. Once interpreted as a grave with flowers; now debated as possible contamination. But still hauntingly human.

The ruins of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where the 9th-century scholar Al-Kindi invented frequency analysis, the technique of cracking codes by counting how often letters appear. This breakthrough underlies all modern cryptography.