The room we are in is locked. It is windowless and lit from above by a fluorescent bulb. In the hallway outside—two stories beneath the city of London—attendants in dark suits patrol silently, giving ...

For more than a century, scholars stared at the same strange marks and got almost nowhere. The signs belonged to Linear Elamite, a 4,000-year-old writing system from ancient Iran. They appeared on ...

Early writing is a tale of two scripts. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform both emerged independently about 5300 years ago. The political powers of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia ...