July 5

Austen Henry Layard, who excavated Nimrud and Nineveh and helped bring the library of Ashurbanipal to light, died in London.

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, an Egyptian scholar known for the literary and hermeneutic study of the Qur'an at Cairo University, died at the age of 66.

On 5 July 1996 at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, Dolly the sheep became the first mammal cloned from an adult body cell; her birth was made public the following February.