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

When a vast library of texts amassed by Mesopotamian King Ashurbanipal was burned to the ground about 2700 years ago, the ...

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

Layard’s excavations revealed large quantities of clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform, the script used by the Assyrians and Babylonians. These tablets, some of which contained detailed records ...

Fragment of a Neo-Assyrian tablet preserving wax, in the British Museum. ( The Trustees of the British Museum) The writing ...

The earliest cuneiform tablets are almost all records of accountancy ... They represent a marvellous challenge. One hard-to-learn script, two hard-to-learn languages and the whole of ancient ...

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

Sumerian civilization appears to have evolved in Southern Mesopotamia around 4000 BC, while some historians place it as far back as 5000 BC.

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 ...

JANE SWEENEY/GETTY IMAGES The tablets were in Akkadian, an ancient language written in cuneiform script. Its characters are formed from strokes in the form of wedges, the Latin word for which ...

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 ...