Berossus, a Babylonian priest writing in Greek, preserved a version of the Sumerian King List that includes rulers said to have lived for thousands of years. But how reliable is this account? In this ...

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 ...

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 ...

More than 5,000 years ago, the world’s oldest known writing system emerged in what is now Iraq, establishing the country as the epicenter of recorded human history. […] ...

For centuries, scholars have puzzled over the origins of the world’s first writing system. Now, a study by Italian researchers reveals that some of these earliest proto-cuneiform signs may have ...