Assyriology (from Greek Ἀσσυρίᾱ, Assyriā; and -λογία, -logia), also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, is the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic study of the cultures that used cuneiform writing. The field covers Pre Dynastic Mesopotamia, Sumer, the early Sumero-Akkadian city-states, the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, the Akkadian and Imperial Aramaic speaking states of Assyria, Babylonia and the Sealand Dynasty, the migrant foreign dynasties of southern Mesopotamia, including the Gutians, Amorites, Kassites, Arameans, Suteans and Chaldeans. Assyriology can be included to cover Neolithic pre-Dynastic cultures dating to as far back as 8000 BC, to the Islamic Conquest of the 7th century AD, so the topic is significantly wider than that implied by the root "Assyria".

The large number of cuneiform clay tablets preserved by these Sumero-Akkadian and Assyro-Babylonian cultures provide an extremely large resource for the study of the period. The region's—and the world's—first cities and city-states, like Ur, are archaeologically invaluable for studying the growth of urbanization.

Scholars of Assyriology develop proficiency in the two main languages of Mesopotamia: Akkadian (including its major dialects) and Sumerian. Familiarity with neighbouring languages such as Biblical Hebrew, Hittite, Elamite, Hurrian, Imperial Aramaic, Eastern Aramaic dialects, Old Persian, and Canaanite are useful for comparative purposes, and the knowledge of writing systems that use several hundred core signs. There now exist many important grammatical studies and lexical aids. Although scholars can draw from a large corpus of literature, some tablets are broken, or in the case of literary texts where there may be many copies the language and grammar are often arcane. Scholars must be able to read and understand modern English, French, and German, as important references, dictionaries, and journals are published in those languages.^{[citation needed]}

The term was first used by Ernest Renan in 1859 as a parallel to the term Egyptology, in a discussion of the translation of Assyrian terms from other cuneiform languages. By 1897 Fritz Hommel described the term as misleading, and today the International Association for Assyriology itself calls the term "old-fashioned".

The term is widely considered ambiguous, being defined in different ways by different scholars in the field. Today, alternate terms such as "cuneiform studies" or "study of the Ancient Near East" are also used.

Originally Assyriology referred primarily to the study of the texts in the Assyrian language discovered in quantity in the north of modern-day Iraq, ancient Assyria, following their initial discovery at Khorsabad in 1843. Although the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform had taken place prior, much of the subsequent decipherment of cuneiform was carried out using the multilingual Achaemenid royal inscriptions, comparing the previously deciphered Persian with the Assyrian cuneiform where used in parallel scripts. Usage of the term began to expand after it was noticed that, in addition to Old Persian and Assyrian, the cuneiform script had been used for a sister language, Babylonian. Babylonian and Assyrian had diverged around 2000 BCE from their ancestor, an older Semitic language that their speakers referred to as "Akkadian".

From 1877, excavations at Girsu showed that before Akkadian, cuneiform had been used to write a completely different language, Sumerian. "Sumerology" therefore gradually became a branch of Assyriology. Subsequent research showed that during the 2nd millennium BC, cuneiform writing had also been used for other languages such as Ugaritic, Hurrian, Hittite or Elamite, which became subsumed under the increasingly ambiguous term Assyriology. Today the term designates the study of texts written in cuneiform script, irrespective of whether the script is from Egypt, Sumer, or Assyria.

For many centuries, European knowledge of Mesopotamia was largely confined to often dubious classical sources, as well as biblical writings. From the Middle Ages onward, there were scattered reports of ancient Mesopotamian ruins. As early as the 12th century, the ruins of Nineveh were correctly identified by Benjamin of Tudela, also known as Benjamin Son of Jonah, a rabbi from Navarre, who visited the Jews of Mosul and the ruins of Assyria during his travels throughout the Middle East. The identification of the city of Babylon was made in 1616 by Pietro Della Valle. Pietro gave "remarkable descriptions" of the site, and brought back to Europe inscribed bricks that he had found at Nineveh and Ur.