The Epic of Gilgamesh, known as the oldest story in history, is thought to have been written in the early 2nd millennium BC, with the original being even older, in the 4th millennium BC. Journalist ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

CHICAGO One of the stars of the Oriental Institute’s new show, “Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond,” is a clay tablet that dates from around 3200 B.C. On it, ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. SAN FRANCISCO — A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian ...

In southern Iran, in the sun-baked lands of Kerman, archaeologists have been digging up the remains of an unknown culture for two decades. Pre-Mesopotamian writing, planned cities, ritual objects of ...