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 ...

While humans have been making their mark on the surfaces of this Earth for at least tens of thousands of years, it's difficult to pinpoint the exact moment our impulse to record what we saw tipped ...

SANTA CRUZ — While a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, UC Santa Cruz history professor Elaine Sullivan unearthed ancient artifacts in Syria marked with an alphabetic script whose ...

Archaeologists say they have uncovered evidence of what may be the world's oldest known alphabet. The alphabetic writing system was identified on finger-length clay cylinders excavated from a tomb ...

Sumerians weren’t the only prehistoric people to conceive of writing, but as history has it, they were first. Proto-cuneiform arose between 3,350 and 3,000 C.E. in the city of Uruk, in present ...

SAN DIEGO (CN) — The Rosetta Stone for deciphering and tracing the origins of one of humankind’s earliest writing systems might just be cylindrical seals used to imprint images onto a series of ...

UC Santa Cruz professor Elaine Sullivan in 2004 at the ancient burial site in Syria where she unearthed artifacts inscribed with the earliest known examples of alphabetic writing.

While still a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, UC Santa Cruz professor Elaine Sullivan unearthed ancient artifacts in Syria marked with the oldest known alphabetic symbols.