Akkadian Tablet: A fragment of the Epic of Adapa. (Morgan Library) I grew up hearing the Code of Hammurabi read out loud, in Akkadian, at the dining-room table. I did not know that my graduate-student ...

Reading the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, is tough. For one thing, it’s very, very old, and not refracting the text through our 21st-century prism is difficult. For another, it’s written in two odd ...

“Better late than never” might be the motto scholars could apply to the completion of a comprehensive dictionary of a language that has not been spoken for more than 2,000 years. It took nearly a ...

"Like a vessel carrying carnelian or lapis, she is filled with carnelian or lapis -- but I do not know whether the child within her is carnelian or lapis." In this ancient metaphor, and in the ...