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 Sumerians are often credited with creating one of the world’s earliest civilizations, developing cities, writing, and complex social systems in southern Mesopotamia. Yet despite their importance, ...

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 ...

The world’s oldest known writing system may have had its origins in the imagery on decorated cylinders used to denote ownership or record transactions. Some of the symbols on these cylinder seals ...

You have to go back 4,000 years, colleagues said, to find someone as fluent in Sumerian as Miguel Civil. A Catalonian-born professor with a purported photographic memory, he spent decades studying ...

Berossus, a Babylonian priest writing in Greek, preserved a version of the Sumerian King List that includes rulers said to have reigned for extremely long periods. But how accurate is this account? In ...

In ancient times, Mesopotamia, meaning 'land between two rivers', was a vast region that lay between the Tigris and Euphrates river systems, and it is where civilization emerged over 7,000 years ago.