The symbols, made of glazed brick, were used to decorate the façades of temples in Dūr-Šarrukīn, which briefly served as the capital of Assyria, a major civilization of ancient Mesopotamia.

Now, a team from the University of Bologna in Italy has linked symbols on ancient Mesopotamian seals with an archaic visual communication system called proto-cuneiform; an art form which would in ...

The authors suggest these motifs were developed into signs in the proto-cuneiform script seen on 5,000-year-old clay tablets from the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk. These include symbols ...

Some of the symbols on these cylinder seals correspond to those used in proto-cuneiform, a form of proto-writing used in Mesopotamia. The finding indicates that the invention of writing in ...

[Related: Ancient Mesopotamian texts show when and why humans ... that could reveal direct relationships in both the symbol’s graphic form and meaning. “We focused on seal imagery that ...

but it’s not often in the Ancient Near East that one faces mystery symbols on a temple wall,” Martin Worthington, a Trinity University professor specializing in ancient Mesopotamian languages ...