Students in a Near Eastern Studies First Year Seminar try their hand at creating replicas of cuneiform tablets ...

A finger-sized clay cylinder from a tomb in northern Syria appears to be the oldest example of writing using an alphabet ...

Scholars consider cuneiform the first writing system, and humans used its wedge-shaped characters to inscribe ancient languages such as Sumerian on clay tablets beginning around 3400 BC.

Johns Hopkins Assyriologist Jacob Lauinger has the rare privilege of translating a once-in-a-lifetime archaeological find: a ...

The wedge-shaped writing on the tablets, known as cuneiform, demonstrated that these ancient stargazers used geometric calculations to predict the motion of Jupiter. Scholars had assumed it wasn ...

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 ...

The finding reinforces an idea proposed in earlier research: that cuneiform script — which ... often to verify a transaction or, later, a letter. Some of the seals examined in the new study ...

The earliest known writing system is thought to be Sumerian cuneiform, which grew up around the region of present-day Iraq, dating from about 3350-3000BC. Now, experts have linked early cuneiform ...

Developed by the Sumerians and written on clay tablets, the first cuneiform is largely sourced back to the urban city of Uruk, or modern day Iraq. Thousands of tablets have since been unearthed ...

“It has this small triangle shape at the end, which you press on the soft clay to imprint the Cuneiform letters, which are represented through different groups of long or short triangles or arrows.

Some of the symbols on these cylinder seals correspond to those used in proto-cuneiform, a form of proto-writing used in Mesopotamia. The finding indicates that the invention of writing in ...