Cuneiform, the oldest identified writing system, defied deciphering – until 1857. What happened then makes a terrific read, ...

Researchers investigating how the first writing arose identified the motifs on preliterate "cylinder seals" used in the trade of agricultural products and textiles.

Instead of referring to sounds in an essentially arbitrary way, pictures refer to the world. As such, they require no learning and no translation—making emojis akin to the earlist forms of writing.

Photograph of proto-cuneiform tablet showing signs discussed in the article. (Colour image of drawing of Fig. 4 in the article - Ref_ Englund 1994 ATU 5_ pl. 71).

The team compared cylinder seal motifs with proto-cuneiform signs, aiming to find correlations that could be convincingly shown to not only relate to shape but also to meaning. They identified ...

ProtoSnap uses computer vision to scan the pixels in a picture of a cuneiform table and compares them to a series of ...

All the signs were produced by a cut reed ... an account of who had been paid and what had been traded. The earliest cuneiform tablets are almost all records of accountancy.

This is a Sumerian cuneiform clay tablet from the Ur III period, c.2100 B.C. This was the heyday of the Sumerian civilisation which occupied much of modern day Iraq. Sumerian was a non-Semitic ...

The cuneiform sign for "head" evolved over more than 2,000 years from the pictorial sign on the left to the much simplified sign on the right. Source: Public Domain/Wikipedia Most of the earliest ...