Indeed, the Iraqi dictator was said to be so immersed in his novel-writing that he left much of the military strategising to his sons leading up to the 2003 war. He continued writing in prison, using ...

In the second AMME seminar of the fall semester, we celebrated the Rosetta Stone bicentennial with two presentations on deciphering ancient scripts. The presentations by Dr. Thomas Christiansen ...

The mystery of cuneiform, the world’s oldest writing system, remained unsolved for centuries. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century, driven by groundbreaking discoveries in Mesopotamia, that a ...

Journalist Hammer follows up The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu with another dazzling archival adventure. By the 1850s, several scholars claimed to have decoded cuneiform, an ancient Mesopotamian ...

Over the past century, archaeologists have uncovered more than 1,600 Proto-Elamite inscriptions, but only about 43 in Linear Elamite, scattered widely across Iran. Illustration by Meilan Solly / ...

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 ...