In a windowless office at UCLA’s Kinsey Hall, professor Robert Englund is translating clay markings into bytes, turning one of the oldest forms of communication into one of the newest. Englund and a ...

Digital Clay: Cuneiform languages represent the earliest known writing systems in human history. The Sumerians used this method by making indentations in clay tablets, a practice later adopted by ...

Get inspired by a weekly roundup on living well, made simple. Sign up for CNN’s Life, But Better newsletter for information and tools designed to improve your well-being. Researchers have uncovered ...

SCRIBE STATUE. FOUND: Lagash, Iraq. CULTURE: Sumerian. DATE: ca. 2400 B.C. LANGUAGE: Sumerian. In early 2016, hundreds of media outlets around the world reported that a set of recently deciphered ...

The man in the center with the full white beard is Mr. Finkel, an expert on cuneiform writing. The British Museum has 130,000 cuneiform clay tablets waiting to be deciphered. Finkel has a clay tablet ...

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 ...

Researchers see new possibilities in reconstructing knowledge of early cultures / Cooperation among the Berlin Vorderasiatisches Museum, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the ...

What does it take to decipher an extinct writing system? If Joshua Hammer’s new book The Mesopotamian Riddle: An archaeologist, a soldier, a clergyman, and the race to decipher the world’s oldest ...

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

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 ...