Explore the Sumerian innovations that birthed civilization! Discover their groundbreaking contributions to law, writing, and ...

Delve into the world's earliest writing systems, exploring diverse origins beyond cuneiform. Uncover how ancient ...

The ancient Sumerians developed this writing system more than 5,000 years ago. Tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets still await translation. It’s not a language. It’s not an alphabet, either, ...

Writing, laws, cities, and science—these and other innovations were devised by the enterprising peoples living in Sumer, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, some 5,000 years ago. High ...

Miguel Civil, the world’s leading expert in the earliest known written language, died on Jan. 13 at age 92. The scholar at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute was described as understanding ...

In 1969, a Bulgarian archaeologist pulled a small clay tablet with engraved marks from the ground. It was over six thousand years old. And it remains undeciphered. In 1969, in a village in ...

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 it, ...

Sumer was humanity's first great civilization. Even in today’s society you can still find traces of Sumerian inventions in agriculture, language, mathematics, religion and astronomy. The ancient ...