Rows of tiny crosses and dots run along the flank of a mammoth no bigger than your palm. Someone carved it from a tusk around ...

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 ...

The symbols, discovered on 40,000-year-old artifacts in caves in southwest Germany, may have been a precursor to the first written language ...

Strange symbols carved onto a Stone Age mammoth ivory plate found at a cave in southwest Germany could be the earliest known ...

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 ...

New research shows early humans created structured ancient symbol systems 40,000 years ago, long before formal writing appeared.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Cuneiform cookies? Yes, they are a thing. Though it has been centuries since Akkadian was spoken, cuneiform writing has had an unexpected burst of popularity as a cookie decoration. The idea started ...

Digital Clay: Cuneiform languages represent the earliest known writing systems in human history. The Sumerians used this method by making indentations in clay tablets, a practice later adopted by ...