Writing is traditionally regarded as one of the requirements for a society to be considered as a civilization. Various writing systems have been invented by the great civilizations of the world, one...
This year has provided an array of exciting, and sometimes puzzling, discoveries for archaeologists and ancient history enthusiasts. Looking back to our most ancient ancestors, a few of the...
In my book, Olmec Language and Literature , I explain how I deciphered the Olmec language. One of the most important documents used in my research was a Bi-lingual Mayan-Olmec text inscribed on a...
The monumental Musaeum of Alexandria was famous for its legendary library. The tragic story of the building’s destruction continues to be a painful one for people who love ancient history and...
The Sogdians were a people of Iranian origin who lived in the fertile valleys of Central Asia between the sixth century BC and tenth century AD. The secret to the Sogdians’ success was their knack...
The ancient Egyptian language is not just one set of symbols which people find on papyri bookmarks at museums. It's a complicated system of symbols which changed over time. Moreover, the words found...
Unlike ancient Latin and Greek texts, Egyptian hieroglyphs have been mostly inaccessible for the average ancient history enthusiast. But this is beginning to change with a collection of texts that...
While excavating the ancient Roman site of Ad Putea in modern Riben, Bulgaria, researchers made a startling discovery – an artifact that they believe may be one of the earliest attempts of writing in...
Recently discovered ancient British Roman texts on wax-covered wood tablets with legal, correspondence, note-taking and accounting documents have been translated, and researchers are now releasing...
The Bat Creek stone was discovered in a small mound near Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. The archaeologists who dug it up in 1889 discovered a small stone tablet engraved with several mysterious...
Alberto Nadgar Rojas, researcher, visual artist, and photographer, defends the existence in northern Chile of an ancient civilization of giants as a hypothesis to explain what may be the biggest...
Amy Pullan-Sheffield For decades, linguists have questioned the origin of Yiddish, the millennium-old language of Ashkenazic Jews. Now, the Geographic Population Structure (GPS), which converts DNA...
A new University of Cambridge research project is set to shed light on the history of writing in the ancient world, and explore the long-lasting relationship between society and writing that persists...
A recent study of the writing on four lead tablets shows the importance of staying on your neighbors’ good side in ancient Greece. The artifacts are “curse tablets”, and were created to send bad luck...
Researchers excavating a site in Poggio Colla, northeast of Florence, in Italy discovered a rare stele while working in their 2015 field season. The large stele contains text that is believed to be...
Oracle bones (known in Chinese as 甲骨, transliterated as ‘jiǎ gǔ’, and literally translated as ‘shells and bones’) are a type of artifact best known for its association with the Shang Dynasty (roughly...