Cuneiform, the oldest identified writing system, defied deciphering – until 1857. What happened then makes a terrific read, in Joshua Hammer's The Mesopotamian Riddle ...

Excavations on unpromising mounds in the Iraqi desert revealed Sumer’s earliest city. Surviving relics and a rebuilt temple ...

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 ...

More than 200 clay cuneiform tablets and 60 seals linked to the Ancient Mesopotamian government were discovered by archaeologists at the ancient Sumerian city Girsu or the present-day site Tello ...

The cuneiform tablets discovered there and in other Hittite sites represent one of the largest groups of texts from the ancient Near ... alongside Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hurrian texts.

Writing and trade are deeply intertwined, and some of the oldest surviving cuneiform writing was used in ancient Mesopotamia to keep records of the buying and selling of goods. In ancient ...

It is one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge: a vast library of texts amassed by Assyrian King Ashurbanipal, who ruled ancient Mesopotamia ... Written in cuneiform, the world’s ...

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 ...