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.

A cuneiform clay tablet that has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time. The tablet is now known to be a contemporary Sumerian observation of an asteroid impact at ...

Linguists used Akkadian writing on bilingual cuneiform tablets from Iraq to translate the text in Amorite, an unknown language, study said. Rudolf H. Mayr Photo from the Rosen Collection used with ...

A 3,800-year-old Babylonian tablet from the ancient Sumerian city-state of Ur in Mesopotamia—now Tell el-Muqayyar—is the oldest documented customer complaint known to man. In the clay tablet, a man ...

Archaeologists have uncovered a tiny 3,500-year-old tablet inscribed with cuneiform writing during excavations at a site in Turkey that could shed light on what life was like during the Late Bronze ...

An ancient game board, building remains and three clay tablets recently discovered by archaeologists in northeastern Iraq ...