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 ...

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 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 ...

Inscriptions on a set of four clay tablets from the ancient Near Eastern civilization of Babylonia have finally been completely deciphered, thousands of years after they were produced, a study reports ...

Tablets from some of the world’s oldest civilisations hold rich details about life thousands of years ago, but few people today can read them. New technology is helping to unlock them. Broken and ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Gonzalo Rubio spends his days reading dead languages that haven't been spoken for thousands of ...

A Turkish expert on ancient Mesopotamia has dedicated more than half a century of his life to unearth history, culture and language dating back to over five millennia in the cradle of civilization. In ...

For instance, there's some doubt over whether Thomas Edison really came up with the idea of the motion picture camera — or whether he pinched it. There's also a question mark over whether "ignored" ...

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 ...