On it, written in cuneiform, the script language of ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia, ... Writing came to China as early as around 1200 B.C. and to the Maya in Mesoamerica long before A.D. 500.

Both Mayan and Egyptian served only one language, while cuneiform, invented by ancient Sumerians around 3500 B.C., was adopted by many different Mesopotamian peoples who spoke Semitic and Indo ...

Dead languages are famously hard to decipher. It took 23 years to crack the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone. It took nearly two centuries to understand Mayan glyphs. And it took over ...

Houston, a Maya expert, was joined by Oxford Egyptologist John Baines and Johns Hopkins' Jerrold Cooper, ... Egyptian, cuneiform and Mayan must have accrued sufficient negative prestige and stigma to ...

Only three books remain, and a fourth has just 10 pages remaining, he says. The last Mayan city fell to the Spanish in 1697. But many hieroglyphs chiselled into buildings and stone monuments ...