Tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets are sitting around, just waiting to be translated. It's not an easy job; the ancient language is based on wedge-shaped pictograms and includes more than 1,000 ...

Instead of referring to sounds in an essentially arbitrary way, pictures refer to the world. As such, they require no learning and no translation—making emojis akin to the earlist forms of writing.

Deciphering some people's writing can be a major challenge—especially when that writing is cuneiform characters imprinted onto 3,000-year-old tablets. Now, Middle East scholars can use ...

This is a Sumerian cuneiform clay tablet from the Ur III period, c.2100 B.C. This was the heyday of the Sumerian civilisation which occupied much of modern day Iraq. Sumerian was a non-Semitic ...