Ancient carvings once thought decorative may actually be early attempts to record information. Their statistical complexity matches that of proto-cuneiform, pushing the origins of writing-like systems ...

The man in the center with the full white beard is Mr. Finkel, an expert on cuneiform writing. The British Museum has 130,000 cuneiform clay tablets waiting to be deciphered. Finkel has a clay tablet ...

An Assyrian gypsum cuneiform dedicatory panel, reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I, circa 1243-1207 BC. Of rectangular form, finely engraved on both sides, with 280 lines of text divided into eight columns ...

More than 40,000 years ago, Ice Age humans were carving repeated patterns of dots, lines, and crosses into tools and small ivory figurines. A new computational study of more than 3,000 of these ...

Cuneiform tablets are among the earliest surviving written records in human history. By recreating tablets from the Epic of Gilgamesh in gingerbread, the process highlights how cuneiform was formed, ...

1. The Sumerian Account of the Invention of Writing -- 2. Time and Place of the Invention -- 3. Received Ideas: The Pictographic Origins of Cuneiform Writing -- 4. Received Ideas: The Origin of ...

Academics may have finally pinpointed the predecessor to humanity’s first written language. Three researchers from the University of Bologna contributed to this longstanding debate in the latest issue ...

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 ...