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.

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 ...

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 ...