insider.si.edu

The invention of cuneiform writing in Sumer Jean-Jacques Glassner ; translated and edited by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van de Mieroop

1. The Sumerian Account of the Invention of Writing -- 2. Time and Place of the Invention -- 3. Received Ideas: The Pictographic Origins of Cuneiform Writing -- 4. Received Ideas: The Origin of ...
WBUR

What makes the world’s first bar joke funny? No one knows.

This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. The story appears in podcast feeds under the title, "Jokes, Part I: Sumer Funny, Sumer Not." Listen to part two here.
insider.si.edu

The Sumerians their history, culture, and character Samuel Noah Kramer

Archeology and decipherment -- History : heroes, kings, and ensi's -- Society : the Sumerian city -- Religion : theology, rite, and myth -- Literature : the Sumerian ...
Times Union

Miguel Civil, pre-eminent scholar of world's oldest written language, dies at 92

You have to go back 4,000 years, colleagues said, to find someone as fluent in Sumerian as Miguel Civil. A Catalonian-born professor with a purported photographic memory, he spent decades studying ...