This Sumerian clay tablet from ancient southern Mesopotamia shows a tally of sheep and goats using incised cuneiform characters. Denise Schmandt-Besserat made...

Writing system of the Sumerians and Baby-lonians (dating back to about 2900 BC). Its name is derived from the wedge-shaped impressions scratched into clay tablets with styluses. Edzard, D.O. 1976–80. Keilschrift. In D.O.Edzard et al. (eds),...

The cuneiform (kjuːniːəfɔːm) script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Created by the Sumerians from ca. 3000 BC (with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium Uruk IV period[1]), cuneiform writing began as a system...

It has become a truism that Akkadian, the principal Semitic language of ancient Mesopotamia, was the lingua franca of the Near East during the second millennium B.C.E. This is stated, more or less in so many words, in any number of works on...

In this book devoted to various types of cuneiform alphabets from the Late Bronze age found in Ugarit and other sites in Syria, Lebanon,and Palestine, M. Dietrich and O. Loretz deal with the texts in the "short alphabet" and the alphabet tablet of Bet...

A 4,000-year-old clay tablet authorities suspect was smuggled illegally from Iraq was pulled from eBay just minutes before the close of the online auction, authorities said Tuesday.Criminal proceedings have been launched against the seller, identified only as a resident of Zurich, officials said.A German archaeologist...

An antique dealer was sentenced Friday to nearly five years in prison for working with his parents to create sophisticated fakes of statues, paintings and other works and passing them off as priceless.Judge William Morris sentenced Shaun Greenhalgh, 47, of Bolton, to four years and...