Collectively, the articles here provide well-documented challenges to conventional wisdom about that for which people actually used Sumerian, Egyptian, Hittite, and Hebrew. This conference was the first to bring leading philologists together with anthropologists and social theorists to explore what writing meant to politics in the ancient Near East.
Some temples built during the second half of Early Dynastic Period (2600-2300 BC) in Mesopotamia have an outside wall with an oval shape. The most up-to-date academic reference can be found here (*), I will just discuss it later.