It’s important to use the right words when writing about writing. Scholars studying the history of it distinguish between pre-writing symbols used to mark objects and more precise marks that establish ...

Around 4000 years ago, in the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, Ancient Mesopotamia developed the first written language of the world. On view until June 2020, the “Ancient Mesopotamia ...

Gonzalo Rubio spends his days reading dead languages that haven't been spoken for thousands of years. An assyriologist at Pennsylvania State University, Rubio studies the world's very first written ...

The University’s recently completed reference work to a dead Mesopotamian language has a lively following. The response has pleased Martha T. Roth, editor-in-charge of the Assyrian Dictionary. A ...

Sumer was humanity's first great civilization. Even in today’s society you can still find traces of Sumerian inventions in agriculture, language, mathematics, religion and astronomy. The ancient ...

This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. Listen to part two here. This episode originally aired on August 5, 2022. In the late 1800s, archeologists in Iraq ...

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Inscriptions on a set of four clay tablets from the ancient Near Eastern civilization of Babylonia have finally been completely deciphered, thousands of years after they were produced, a study reports ...