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 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 ...
The Sunday Times

Prof. A. Sathasivam’s Sumerian–Dravidian scholarly legacy must endure

I have come to know two important scholars, and each of them had 500 words to compare two languages. The first one was Prof. A. Sathasivam, about whom Prof. T. Burrow of the Oriental Institute of the ...
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 ...