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 ...

Gonzalo Rubio spends his days reading dead languages that haven't been spoken for thousands of years. An assyriologist at Pennsylvania State University, Rubio studies the world's very first written ...

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 you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. SAN FRANCISCO — A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian ...

ONE of the most interesting peoples of the ancient world was the Sumerian race, which founded the great civilisation of Babylonia. The cuneiform writing of western Asia was their invention, and the ...