Who Really Invented the Alphabet?
August 2023 | Vol. 11.8 By Seth Sanders Who really invented the alphabet? Despite its vast influence, we are still uncertain about precisely where the world’s most influential co
Before and After Babel
August 2023 | Vol. 11.8 By Marc Van De Mieroop “But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the sam
Carved, Signed, Crossed Out – Documents on Wooden Sticks from Ancient South Arabia
October 2022 | Vol. 10.10 By Peter Stein Legal contracts carved on palm-leaf stalks, correspondence laid down on cigar-shaped sticks? The mode of writing used in Ancient South Arab
Breaking the Code: Ancient Iran’s Linear Elamite Script Deciphered
september 2022 | Vol. 10.9 By François Desset, Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Matthieu Kervran, Gian Pietro Basello, and Gianni Marchesi Research in the humanities achieves definitive results
The Social Context of Writing in Ancient Ugarit
April 2022 | Vol. 10.4 By Philip Boyes We often ask, what is writing? A better question is, who is writing? It is very easy to approach ancient writing as something rather abstract
From Texts to Scribes: Evidence for Writing in Ancient Israel
What do we know about ancient Israel’s scribal culture? Can two words in the biblical text, the verb ‘write’ (katav) and the noun ‘scribe’ (sofer) help us understand the
Assurbanipal’s iPad: Wax Boards in the Ancient Near East
Writing on wax began in Mesopotamia and spread to the Mediterranean and Europe. But some lingering questions may have finally been answered by a science project with children.