Cuneiform, the oldest identified writing system, defied deciphering – until 1857. What happened then makes a terrific read, in Joshua Hammer's The Mesopotamian Riddle ...

A collection of artefacts collected 2,500 years ago in modern-day Iraq reveal the forgotten world of Mesopotamia, home to ...

found in the ruins of Nimrud (present-day Iraq). These tablets, dating to the 7th century BCE, represent the first material evidence of cuneiform writing on wax. The tablets ...

The earliest cuneiform tablets are almost ... One hard-to-learn script, two hard-to-learn languages and the whole of ancient Mesopotamia is at your feet.

Ancient Chinese writing developed early in the second millennium ... which may have influenced Mesopotamian cuneiform. The proto-Sinaitic script was widely thought to be the oldest alphabet ...

Alongside the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform writing is the world's oldest known writing system that can be deciphered. The earliest Mesopotamian clay tablets containing pictorial script date ...

JANE SWEENEY/GETTY IMAGES The tablets were in Akkadian, an ancient language written in cuneiform script. Its characters ... by moments of revelation. In his first decade working at the museum ...

Professor Kulakoglu explains that many of the words, although Assyrian in origin -- a Semitic language considered an ancestor ...

Decoding such patterns reveals secrets hidden in everything from bone fossils to ancient languages ... the works written in cuneiform script — one of the earliest forms of writing in human ...