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

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

This image may only be used in connection with the press release "From Haft Tappeh to the world wide web", issued by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz on October 14, 2019.

Discover the Imago Mundi, the 2,600-year-old Babylonian world map from Sippar, Iraq. Learn how it blends geography, myth & ...

Ancient instructions for making food often didn't have weights ... archaeologists struggled to translate the cuneiform script ...

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

and a letter in which his sister berates his wife for her poor cuneiform. The Library of Ancient Wisdom is out now in the UK and will be published on 12 May in the US. Embark on a captivating ...

Deciphering some people's writing can be a major challenge—especially when that writing is cuneiform characters imprinted onto 3,000-year-old tablets. Now, Middle East scholars can use ...

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 ...