The research was led by Şanlıurfa's Harran University along with various other participating universities examined a 4,000-year-old Assyrian tablet that contained a prenuptial agreement. They found ...

Cuneiform as a robust writing tradition endured 3,000 years. The script—not itself a language ... a Semitic language that was the lingua franca of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires.

"I have nothing else apart from these funds," she wrote in cuneiform script. "Take care to act so that I will not be ruined ... From about 2000 to 1750 B.C., the city hosted several foreign merchants ...

The finding reinforces an idea proposed in earlier research: that cuneiform script — which was developed ... throughout the ...