It's called 'cuneiform,' which means wedge-shaped ... When did writing develop? The oldest known example of writing comes from Mesopotamia and dates to about 3300 BC. In time different-looking ...

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 ...

When they compared symbols on the cylinder seals with those used in the proto-cuneiform writing system, they found several matches. For example, on both preliterate cylinder seals and proto ...

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 ...

In one example, the tablet claims that if “an ... “This eclipse is … set aside for testing,” the newly translated cuneiform reads at one point, indicating the need for another round ...