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 ...

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 ...

The enigma of Sumerian origins remains one of the most compelling debates in modern archaeology and linguistics. While the Sumerians are credited with establishing the world’s first high civilization ...

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 ...

From 3500–3000 B.C., the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, carved wedge-shaped signs on clay tablets with reed pens. These are cuneiform, the oldest known writing system. The ...

The history of writing is for sale on the Internet, and it’s cheap. The opening bid for a cuneiform cone that allegedly hails from 2000 B.C.E. starts at $1. A square tablet recording a sale that took ...

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 ...