When people living in southern Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq) toward the end of the 4th millennium BC created documents by inscribing cuneiform characters on clay tablets, they took the first step in ...

Miguel Civil, a scholar and researcher at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, was a leading expert on the Sumerian language, the earliest known written language. “No one has known Sumerian ...

ONE of the most interesting peoples of the ancient world was the Sumerian race, which founded the great civilisation of Babylonia. The cuneiform writing of western Asia was their invention, and the ...

The Indus script has been called, with irony, the most deciphered script in the world. The first claim to a decipherment, based on the Sumerian language, was published as early as 1925. More than a ...

Tablets from some of the world’s oldest civilisations hold rich details about life thousands of years ago, but few people today can read them. New technology is helping to unlock them. Broken and ...