1. The Sumerian Account of the Invention of Writing -- 2. Time and Place of the Invention -- 3. Received Ideas: The Pictographic Origins of Cuneiform Writing -- 4. Received Ideas: The Origin of ...

The ancient Sumerians developed this writing system more than 5,000 years ago. Tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets still await translation. It’s not a language. It’s not an alphabet, either, ...

Writing, laws, cities, and science—these and other innovations were devised by the enterprising peoples living in Sumer, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, some 5,000 years ago. High ...

CHICAGO One of the stars of the Oriental Institute’s new show, “Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond,” is a clay tablet that dates from around 3200 B.C. On it, ...

When people living in southern Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq) toward the end of the 4th millennium BC created documents by inscribing cuneiform characters on clay tablets, they took the first step in ...

The history of writing is for sale on the Internet, and it’s cheap. The opening bid for a cuneiform cone that allegedly hails from 2000 B.C.E. starts at $1. A square tablet recording a sale that took ...

Ancient written languages emerged as a revolutionary development in human history, allowing civilizations to record important ...

Carved in the limestone of a desert cliff in Egypt is a 5,250-year-old tableau of a victorious ruler, perhaps the so-called King Scorpion -- whose exploits, previously the stuff of myth and legend, ...

This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. Listen to part two here. This episode originally aired on August 5, 2022. In the late 1800s, archeologists in Iraq ...