The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer Simon & Schuster £25/$29.99, 400 pages ...

The translation of Sumerian tablet from Nippur reveals a rare myth of storm god Ishkur and the earliest trickster fox.

What I would love to see discovered in 2025 is a bilingual inscription (on any medium—stone, pottery, metal) of a Mesopotamian language and the Indus script.

Sumerian Sumerian is widely believed to be the world’s first written language. It originated in ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq, around 3100 BCE.

The system uses both syllables and images— logograms —to record language. It was adapted first for the Sumerian language and, later, for Akkadian and Hittite.

In the last 200 years, archaeologists have found hundreds of thousands of texts that tell the history of ancient Mesopotamia, most of them written in Sumerian or Akkadian, explained the authors ...

Science Ancient DNA shows genetic link between Egypt and Mesopotamia: ‘Highly significant’ By Associated Press Published July 2, 2025, 4:20 p.m. ET ...