When a vast library of texts amassed by Mesopotamian King Ashurbanipal was burned to the ground about 2700 years ago, the clay tablets were preserved by the heat. Selena Wisnom's new book reveals more ...

In southern Iraq, archaeologists have excavated a remarkable collection of carved clay tablets—ancient records of Akkadia, the world’s oldest empire. Marked with the administrative details of ...

The finds, which also include dozens of clay sealings, contain details of a metric system used to measure resources, as well as evidence of a cult of personality around a particularly charismatic rule ...

This piece of clay contains some of the earliest writing ... of who had been paid and what had been traded. The earliest cuneiform tablets are almost all records of accountancy.

This is a Sumerian cuneiform clay tablet from the Ur III period ... Large numbers of these tablets were on the antiquities market c. 1900 and this one was bought by George Titus Barham (1859-1937).

One of the two clay tablets is 4.5cm high and dates from around 3,000 BC. The other measures 3.2 cm and originates from the Irin/Eridu region in southern Iraq. It dates from 1,900-1,700 BC.

They informed Sir Henry Rawlinson, the foremost cuneiform scholar of the time ... where when faced with a table strewn with shattered clay tablets. In 1861 Rawlinson convinced the museum to ...

Luckily, the texts were written on clay tablets ... the shattered remnants of the 30,000 or so tablets in Ashurbanipal’s library. Written in cuneiform, the world’s oldest form of writing ...

was made last autumn at Tello in southern Iraq—the modern Arabic name for the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu—and includes more than 200 clay cuneiform tablets and 60 sealings. The tablets ...