Cuneiform, the oldest identified writing system, defied deciphering – until 1857. What happened then makes a terrific read, ...

Almost 4,000 years ago, a Mesopotamian man named Nanni was so disappointed with the copper he bought from a trader named ...

With so many ancient texts around the world, you might wonder which alphabet was the first to be developed. In other words, ...

Sumerian civilization appears to have evolved in Southern Mesopotamia around 4000 BC, while some historians place it as far ...

The translation of ancient Assyrian writing into modern languages was a challenge that had long vexed historians. Three ...

including the proto-Elamite script from what is now southwestern Iran, which may have influenced Mesopotamian cuneiform. The proto-Sinaitic script was widely thought to be the oldest alphabet ...

A glyph-breaker who didn’t break anything, and that is quite paradoxical, because, to be a true glyph-breaker, you should have deciphered an undeciphered script, like Jean-François Champollion (the ...

In time, Assyria’s fearful reign receded into myth, and its arrow-like script—known as cuneiform, after the Latin for “wedge”—fell out of use. How three Victorians brought Assyria’s ...