Mesopotamian trade symbols may be origins of proto-cuneiform. Cylinder seals linked trade to early script development. Study shows transition from trade symbols to structured writing.

In Between Symbols and Language For this study, researchers started 6,000 years ago, in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, which is located in what is now Iraq. Uruk was a major trade hub, reaching as far ...

Archaeologists have long known that the Maya Lowlands, in the southernmost region of Mexico, harbors ancient urban settings (SN: 10/25/21). When archaeologist Luke Auld-Thomas, of Tulane ...

open image in gallery A proto-cuneiform tablet is seen in this image. Proto-cuneiform was an ancient Mesopotamia writing system that came at the end of the fourth millennium BC (Courtesy of CDLI ...

New research traces Mesopotamia origins of writing back to trade symbols. Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art / CC0 Researchers have found the origins of writing ... This discovery supports an older ...

It also functioned like an early form of branding to identify institutions, the senders of goods or the destinations of the products as they made their way around ancient societies in modern day Iran, ...

the exhibition The Countless Aspects of Beauty in Ancient Art opened in Beijing on Tuesday. The Greek show in China seems a perfect match, since on site, Despoina Ignatiadou, deputy director at ...

The origins of writing in ancient Mesopotamia and beyond may rest on a group of cylindrical seals. A team of archeologists from the University of Bologna in Italy has identified a series of ...

Some of the symbols on these cylinder seals correspond to those used in proto-cuneiform, a form of proto-writing used in Mesopotamia. The finding indicates that the invention of writing in ...

The origins of writing in Mesopotamia lie in the images imprinted by ancient cylinder seals on clay tablets and other artifacts. A research group from the University of Bologna has identified a ...

The origins of writing in Mesopotamia lie in the images imprinted by ancient cylinder seals on clay tablets and other artifacts. A research group from the University of Bologna has identified a ...