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This six-sided prism of baked clay preserves the annals of Sennacherib, who was the king of Assyria from 704-681 BCE. It was written around 689 BCE in the Akkadian language (and cuneiform script). The text contains the records of Sennacherib's eight…

This inscription is written in the Akkadian language that used a cuneiform (literally, 'wedge-shaped') script for letters. The earliest examples of writing from Israel/Palestine are in this script and language. This particular fragment is from…

Writing was invented in southern Mesopotamia, in the ancient kingdom of Sumer, sometime before 3,000 BCE. Cuneiform, the type of writing seen in column 6 of this slide, was a development from earlier 'logographic' writing, in which signs stood for…

The Sumerian King List is the name given to a traditional canon of the early kings of Mesopotamia, thought by some scholars to have been composed in the time of Utu-hegal, a king of the city of Uruk who restored Sumerian independence after the…

The earliest writing was not on paper, but on clay tablets. Instead of a pen, scribes used an instrument called a stylus that was triangular in cross-section. They would press the tip of the stylus into the clay to make the triangular portions of the…

The earliest writing preserved from Israel/Palestine are in the form of cuneiform on clay tablets like this one. The cuneiform script and the languages that were written in it (like Akkadian) were developed in Mesopotamia. This tablet fragment…