Instead of referring to sounds in an essentially arbitrary way, pictures refer to the world. As such, they require no learning and no translation—making emojis akin to the earlist forms of writing.

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 ...

It is written in cuneiform, the oldest known writing in the world, a non-alphabetic kind of writing that grew out of a simple system of pictographs into a flexible medium with which the Sumerian ...

Now, academics at Italy’s University of Bologna have identified links between the designs engraved on these 6,000-year-old cylinders and pictographs in proto-cuneiform script – which came ...