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 ...
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 ...
The Kish tablet is “only” 5,500 years old, whereas the oldest cave painting, which features three humans and a pig, dates back to 50,000 years. However, cave paintings illustrate scenes rather than ...
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 ...
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 ...
Carved in the limestone of a desert cliff in Egypt is a 5,250-year-old tableau of a victorious ruler, perhaps the so-called King Scorpion -- whose exploits, previously the stuff of myth and legend, ...
Sometime around 1800 B.C., a Sumerian scholar inscribed a hand-sized clay tablet with a series of cryptic numbers. The unusual tablet, known as Plimpton 322 (below), has provoked years of fevered ...