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 ...

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 ...

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

It’s not a language. It’s not an alphabet, either, exactly. But if you want to read the original Epic of Gilgamesh, or study the trade records of the ancient Sumerians, cuneiform is the only game in ...

Miguel Civil, a scholar and researcher at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, was a leading expert on the Sumerian language, the earliest known written language. “No one has known Sumerian ...

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 ...

The Epic of Gilgamesh, known as the oldest story in history, is thought to have been written in the early 2nd millennium BC, with the original being even older, in the 4th millennium BC. Journalist ...

Cuneiform cookies? Yes, they are a thing. Though it has been centuries since Akkadian was spoken, cuneiform writing has had an unexpected burst of popularity as a cookie decoration. The idea started ...