The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform, shown here on a clay tablet documenting barley rations issued monthly to adults and children. The language may have died out as a result of a 200-year drought ...

Samuel Noah Kramer, one of the foremost authorities on the ancient Sumerian language and literature, died Monday in his Philadelphia home. He was 93. The University of Pennsylvania, where Mr. Kramer ...

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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 ...

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 ...

Papyrus, parchment, paper ... videotape, DVDs, Blu-ray discs - long after all these materials have crumbled to dust, the first recording medium of all, the cuneiform clay tablet of ancient Mesopotamia ...

Thousands of years before Trader Joe's Cookie Butter Beer ever came to be, the Sumerians were making their own craft-style ...

Note: This article contains no spoilers about the film “Wonder Woman,” unless you count the fact that Wonder Woman can read Sumerian to be a spoiler, in which case, the whole movie has already been ...

SAN FRANCISCO — A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says. Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for ...

SAN FRANCISCO — A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says. Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for ...