“The influence that Mesopotamia has on our own culture is something that people don’t know much about,” says Émilie Pagé-Perron, a researcher in Assyriology at the University of Toronto.

The aircraft designer who’s never flown.That could change thanks to a very modern helper: machine translation. Some 90% of cuneiform texts remain untranslated. However, since cuneiform was first deciphered by scholars around 150 years ago, the script has only yielded its secrets to a small group of people who can read it. An estimated half a million of them have been excavated, and more are still buried in the ground. They chronicle the rise of fall of Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia, the world’s first empires. From furious letters between warring royal siblings to rituals for soothing a fractious baby, the tablets offer a unique insight into a society at the dawn of history. These tiny signs are the remains of the world’s oldest writing system: cuneiform.ĭeveloped more than 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where modern-day Iraq now lies, cuneiform captured life in a complex and fascinating civilisation for some three millennia. Broken and scorched black by fire, the dense, wedge-shaped marks etched into the ancient clay tablets are only just visible under the soft light at the British Museum.

Ancient alien game glyphs