Written English, along with most modern tongues, is so deeply tied to its alphabet that we may take the pairing for granted. But long before Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales, there were ...

It’s not a language. It’s not an alphabet, either, exactly. But if you want to read the original Epic of Gilgamesh, or study the trade records of the ancient Sumerians, cuneiform is the only game in ...

DAMASCUS, 11 January (BelTA - SANA Agensy). - The oldest cuneiform alphabet in history was discovered in Ugarit (Ras Shamra), an ancient city located on the Syrian coast, dating back to 1500 BC.

The script is often tiny—almost too small to see with the naked eye, as small the smallest letters on a dime. Why so tiny? That remains one of cuneiform’s biggest mysteries.

While cuneiform is considered the world’s oldest writing system, having emerged before 3400 BCE in Mesopotamia, it is neither an alphabet nor a language but rather a set of characters denoting ...

While earlier writing systems had already emerged before 2400 B.C.—such as cuneiform, for example—these did not make use of an alphabet. Cuneiform, considered to be the oldest known writing ...