In ancient Mesopotamia, cuneiform writing was the domain of a small elite. Scribes, trained for years, mastered a complex ...

Italian researchers suggest that symbols from the oldest writing system in the world may have come directly from cylinder seal motifs. Reading time 3 minutes For centuries, scholars have puzzled over ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Making the jump from using symbols to writing is considered a major development in human cognitive abilities. Tracing how and when ...

Across the ancient southern Levant, some cylinder seals carried inscriptions that looked like cuneiform but could not be ...

This book discusses the alphabetic scribes (sēpiru) mentioned in Mesopotamian documents of the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods - specifically, of the 6th-5th centuries BCE. The period in ...

Part of a cretulae used to secure containers. (Universita di Pisa) A team of Italian and Iraqi archaeologists has unearthed hundreds of cuneiform tablets in central Iraq. They also uncovered some clay ...

New discoveries by a UCF researcher and her team at the ancient Mesopotamian site of Kurd Qaburstan, including clay tablets with ancient cuneiform writing, a game board and large structural remains, ...

The world’s oldest known writing system may have had its origins in the imagery on decorated cylinders used to denote ownership or record transactions. Some of the symbols on these cylinder seals ...

Cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia cover a range of topics, from exorcising ghosts to uncovering the location of Noah’s Ark. Cuneiform tablet, c. 2nd–1st century B.C.E., Mesopotamia, probably ...

Co-authors Kathryn Kelley and Mattia Cartolano from the University of Bologna's Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies studied seal imagery from before the invention of writing. A ...

The Indo-European family of languages is the largest in the world, with over 150 languages and 3 billion speakers today. The ...