
Ancient Academia: the life of a Mesopotamian scholar in the seventh century B.C - diodorus
https://www.archaeology.org/issues/372-2003/digs/8437-digs-iraq-assyrian-scholars
======
cletus
Cuneiform tables [1] are one of those historical artifacts that I find
fascinating. Some fun facts:

\- Between 500,000 and 2,000,000 tablets have been found

\- Less than 100,000 have been translated

\- Cuneiform tablets date back to ~3500 BC

\- Roughly 30,000 tablets were recovered from the royal archives at Hattusa
(Hittite capital) [2] in central Turkey. This archive and the site probably
survived because this ancient city was largely forgotten about until
archaeologists discovered it in the 19th century.

\- This archive produced the earliest known peace treaty between the Hittites
and Egyptians

\- These archives contain essentially the personal correspondence between
Ramses II and the Hittite king [3]

\- Cuneiform tablets have been one of the most important sources of written
records from the ancient world [4]

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattusa#Cuneiform_royal_archiv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattusa#Cuneiform_royal_archives)

[3]:
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/07-...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/07-08/ancient-
egypt-ramses-pharaoh-hittite-royal-wedding/)

[4]:
[http://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=objects1to10](http://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=objects1to10)

~~~
melling
“Less than 100,000 have been translated”

Can’t that be addressed with deep learning and crowdsourcing?

~~~
wl
Perhaps, but I'm skeptical.

Transcribing the cuneiform script is difficult. There are hundreds of signs.
Transcribing a tablet requires some understanding of the language because a
sign can take on many different values (polyphony), some signs are so similar
that they can only be differentiated by context, and if you're dealing with a
language like Hittite, you need to recognize when a sign should be understood
as representing an Akkadian or Sumerian word or grammatical construct as a
scribal abbreviation. All this changes from language to language and era to
era. Also, how signs are written changes over time. And then, getting into the
physical aspects of working with tablets, pretty much all of them have damage.
Cuneiform is a 3D script and tablets requires varying the light, which won't
be captured from a single photograph. Indeed, line drawings are the standard
way of publishing tablets. When photographs are used, many are taken with
varying light. Some computational techniques are beginning to be used, but
very few tablets are recorded in this way. Many tablets are in fragments
spread around the museums of the world—figuring out which fragments go
together or which tablets are duplicates of each other (to fill in damage) is
the largest part of publishing cuneiform texts.

~~~
zozbot234
3D scanning ought to help, then. Even X-ray CT might make sense, if the
resolution can be pushed high enough to fully capture the carvings that encode
cuneiform script.

~~~
Libbum
The British Museum are working on digitising their collection with 3D scans
and high resolution imaging. The catalogue is slowly coming online, an
example:
[https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_onlin...](https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=1516160001&objectId=295190&partId=1)

