Miguel Civil, a scholar and researcher at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, was a leading expert on the Sumerian language, the earliest known written language. “No one has known Sumerian ...

This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. Listen to part two here. This episode originally aired on August 5, 2022. In the late 1800s, archeologists in Iraq ...

You have to go back 4,000 years, colleagues said, to find someone as fluent in Sumerian as Miguel Civil. A Catalonian-born professor with a purported photographic memory, he spent decades studying ...

Archeology and decipherment -- History : heroes, kings, and ensi's -- Society : the Sumerian city -- Religion : theology, rite, and myth -- Literature : the Sumerian ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: When was the dawn of writing? Cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia seem to answer that question in the sense that symbols represent sounds, ...

ONE of the most interesting peoples of the ancient world was the Sumerian race, which founded the great civilisation of Babylonia. The cuneiform writing of western Asia was their invention, and the ...

This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. The story appears in podcast feeds under the title, "Jokes, Part I: Sumer Funny, Sumer Not." Listen to part two here.