A fierce rivalry between four scholars ignited a race to crack the world’s oldest writing, unlocking the secrets of Mesopotamia after millennia of silence.

Joshua Hammer’s “The Mesopotamian Riddle” chronicles the 19th-century contest between an archaeologist, a soldier and a clergyman to decipher an ancient text ...

Tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets are sitting around, just waiting to be translated. It’s not an easy job; the ancient language is based on wedge-shaped pictograms and includes more than 1,000 ...

Deciphering some people's writing can be a major challenge - especially when that writing is cuneiform characters imprinted into 3,000-year-old tablets. Now, Middle East scholars can use artificial ...

For centuries, the study of cuneiform—the world’s oldest known writing system—relied on painstaking manual transcription, with scholars dedicating years to deciphering individual tablets.

Deciphering some people's writing can be a major challenge—especially when that writing is cuneiform characters imprinted onto 3,000-year-old tablets. Now, Middle East scholars can use ...

Middle Eastern scholars can now use artificial intelligence to identify and copy cuneiform characters from tablet photos, allowing them to read complicated scripts easily. Researchers from Cornell ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Middle East scholars can now use artificial intelligence to identify and copy cuneiform characters from photos of tablets, letting them read complicated scripts with ease.