Some ancient writing systems cannot be deciphered. Can artificial intelligence help crack the codes of the past?

Across the globe, a race is under way to crack some of the last mysterious forms of writing that have never been translated.

When the Amarna Letters were first discovered in Egypt, many scholars thought they were fake. They were not written on papyrus, but clay tablets—a material that wasn’t used in the region. Nor were ...

Ancient scripts like Linear A and Rongorongo are among the mysterious undeciphered languages that continue to puzzle ...

Long before Genesis was written, ancient Mesopotamians told flood stories about heroes like Ziusudra, Atrahasis, and Utnapishtim—men warned by the gods to build massive boats and save life from a ...

Cassius Marcellus Clay might have been invented by a novelist with a penchant for the improbable. One of the most flamboyant and controversial figures of the antebellum era, Clay was born into ...

The British Museum houses around 130,000 clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia written in cuneiform script between 3200 b.c. and the first century a.d. Since so few scholars can read the languages on ...

E Ink tablets have always been intriguing to me because I’m a longtime lover of pen and paper. I’ve had probably hundreds of notebooks over the years, serving as repositories for my story ideas, to-do ...

Excavations at the ancient Anatolian city of Kanesh in Turkey have revealed a district where merchants from the distant Mesopotamian city of Assur in Iraq lived and worked. Some 23,000 cuneiform ...

Need a new tablet to get you through the holidays? We've got massive price drops on slates from top brands like Lenovo, Apple, Google, and more. I’m PCMag’s managing editor for consumer electronics ...

At the underwater archaeology site of Gran Carro di Bolsena in Aiola, Italy, divers found an ancient clay figurine pegged to be from the 9th or 10th century BC. The ritualistic-looking item was ...