Clay minerals are a major constituent of the Earth's surface and are mainly found in the sediments of lakes, rivers and ...

The early writing appears to date to around 2400 B.C.—preceding the previous most bygone examples by roughly 500 years.

Before Mesopotamian people invented writing, they used cylinder seals to press patterns into wet clay – and some of the ...

Excavations by the Kuwaiti-Polish Archaeological Mission at a site in Northern Kuwait's Al-Subiyah desert have uncovered a ...

A small clay tablet from the site of Kish in Iraq reveals a student calculated the area of a triangle incorrectly 4,000 years ...

Although far from the oldest writing we have found, these cylinders are 500 years older than any previously known example of alphabetic script, if that is indeed what they carry.

At an archaeological excavation site in western Syria, Schwartz unearthed a “finger-length” clay cylinder with etched letters ...

A clay cylinder found in a tomb holding six skeletons in northern Syria bears the word “silanu,” which may be a name, says Glenn Schwartz, an archaeologist at Johns Hopkins University.

A team of archaeologists from Johns Hopkins University, led by Professor Glenn Schwartz, has discovered small clay cylinders ...

BCE clay cylinders with oldest known alphabetic writing were uncovered in Syria, challenging the origins of the alphabet.