[BenLurkin]

If you want to try your hand at a 4,500-year-old game, you can find the rules here.

http://www.ancientgames.org/royal-game-ur-game-20-squares/

Go to the Penn Museum website and try out their interactive exhibit that lets you sign your name in cuneiform.
https://www.penn.museum/cgi/cuneiform.php

[Long Jon No Silver]

Any votes for Joe Stalin recorded on those clay tablets?

[ckilmer]

someday among those several thousand “pages” of cuniform writing will be a sumerian language text of the book of job.

[wildbill]

At an advanced age, and in retirement, I reentered the academic field to obtain three Master's degrees. One of my degrees was in English.

I had some courses with hotshot academics brought in from Duke to teach deconstruction theory a la Derida and feminist writing theory. It was the high water mark in an era of new theories of writing and reading texts—until the more recent “woke” theories and white privilege theory came into vogue in academic circles.

One of the feminist theory readings was about the dearth of feminine writers in word civilizations. The explanation was that writing instruments such as quill pens and following inventions of fountain pens and ball pens were in fact representations of the male penis and therefore subtly anti-woman. (I kid you not.I couldn't make this up)

I stopped the professor's argument when I asked what the original writing instrument of cuneiform writing must have represented in a much older culture.