XML for Ancients

Andrew writes: "More than 5,000 years ago, the very first information revolution occurred when some unknown research team in Mesopotamia found a way to download and store language through a killer application called "writing.". The cuneiform digital library will have 60,000 texts ready in a couple of years. Using SVG and XML to represent their documents. Similar efforts are underway for hieroglyphics."

Comments

Slightly off topic.....

[MisterPo]

I have been working in IT since 1997, yeah I know a mere blink of an eye for some Unix Wizards (ie. beards, strange clothing and their own arcane language). What I have noticed is that every year my handwriting has been getting progressively worse. What with my PDA, laptop, PCs etc. I just have no need to wield a pen no more :)

Apart from signing my name on credit card chits, the only time I am required to write is for birthday/Christmas and other assorted cards. Its getting so bad now that I start to write a long word and just give up. My once pristine handwriting now looks like a doctors prescription scrawl.

Any else get this too?

Po

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[Anonymous Coward]

I just have no need to wield a pen no more :)

Apparently, you have no real need to speak your native language properly either.

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[MisterPo]

Who said English was my "mother tongue"?
Besides conversational language is not require to have correct grammar and indeed spelling :P
I can additionally converse just as badly in another four languages, how many can you?

Regards,

Po

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[ilovecheese]

Yup, that goes here too. I have been in IT since 1991. My signature got so bad, that most people can't make it out, and my writing (script) is incomprehensible. Most of the people I know that have been in IT for quite an extensive period of time have the same symptoms. ;)

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[ConsumedByTV]

Ironicly you made a shitload of mistakes in your retort on how you should be able to make mistakes during a conversation... :)

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[MisterPo]

Errr that was the point I was trying to make.
Hehehe you spelled your first word wrongly :P

Regards,

Po

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Incorrectly "... personally i can speak badly in three languages. Though I can speak fluently in three others, how about yourself?

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[MisterPo]

Let me see, speak fluently in 4 and badly in another 4 others......lets call it a draw :)

Po

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[motherhead]

Blah blah blah, DTP, CAD and IT since 1993 blah blah blah

Interesting you should mention that; recently I had decided discovered that I could no longer write in script correctly. It was as if the ability just fell out of my head. I utterly un-knew it.

Now I was taught cursive script by nuns, which were not gentle about teaching the elegance of script. So I was stunned and scared. I had to secretly, (lest anyone realize how ridiculous this looked) re-learn the subtleties of upper and lower case script writing by actually practicing worksheet style... very, very embarrassing...

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[Samrobb]

After 8 years as a developer, my handwriting is fine (well, my printing... I never really was one for cursive.) After four years in the Navy, though, while all my other handwriting skills remained more or less consistent, my signature went from something readable to an almost completely illegible scrawl. At about the same time, the exact same thing happened to my wife's signature - she was working as a social worker in a nursing home, and signing something every five minutes.

I don't think either one of us could actually produce a readable signature anymore even if we tried.

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[posmon]

4|\|d |7z 907 2 743 |^0||\|7 4 /\/\3 \/\/43|2 /\/\057 |^30|^|3 (4|\|7 |234d /\/\^/ 7^/|^||\|9 3|743|2!

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[Pentagram]

I've always assumed it was the other way around - people with terrible handwriting start using computers just so they can use a keyboard rather than a pen. I don't think I've ever met a proper computer geek who can write legibly.

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[Quay42]

There couldn't possibly me any other computer geeks out there with bad handwriting ;) My signature has become the first letter of my first name and then a somewhat recognizable first letter to my last name (which has 8 letters in it) followed by a line. This is probably why my CS professor has started more and more to require assignments to be typed. Why anyone would turn in a *written* assignment anyhow is beyond me :P

Hmm...that was pointless..

Cheers,
jw

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm left handed.

Those you are will tell you that cursive writing was def _NOT_ designed for left handed people. Just try using a "roller ball" pen, they're designed to be "pulled" across the paper but a lefty spends most of thier writing time pushing it to the next letter. A black hand is not the only writing specific hurdle for left handers.

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[Anonymous Coward]

More importantly - why would anyone ever go to the bother of writing something they couldn't have persistant RAM access to? Hand written documents might as well be "written" in stone. If it was worth being written, it's worth not having to write again.

Re:Slightly off topic.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an au contraire of one -- though with age my hand has loosened a little, it's still quite small and legible. In TTY days I had to code on engineer's graph paper before chunk-chunking it in, and even now my capitals are 1/4-inch tall and I can get 10 char/inch while being readable.

OTOH, I'm also a graphic designer too, so I pay attention to these things.

Is access going to be free?

[A Commentor]

Site appears to be slash-dotted already...

So.. Are these 5000 year old documents going to be freely available or will the database of texts be copyrighted/restricted?

Re:Is access going to be free?

[recursiv]

Why do I always people saying things like: "Slashdotted already! What a pity... It should have been cached."

But when I click on the link anyway, the site loads with on problem. This is the rule not the exception. The amount of times I can't get to a link from slashdot is surprisingly low.

Re:Is access going to be free?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are behind a proxy server you might see the site even if it is already down. Even if you haven't set it up in your browser there are ways an ISP can setup a proxy so that it is completely transparent to the users.

Re:Is access going to be free?

[Anonymous Coward]

No idea if this is the case here, but often certain routes to a host will work and others won't.

Re:Is access going to be free?

[IHateEverybody]

Why do I always people saying things like: "Slashdotted already! What a pity... It should have been cached."

But when I click on the link anyway, the site loads with on problem. This is the rule not the exception. The amount of times I can't get to a link from slashdot is surprisingly low.

That's because those people are the ones who do the actual slashdotting. Usually by the time normal people like you and me click on the link, somebody at the other end has noticed that their site is down due to a DBS (Denial by Slashdot) attack and has set up a couple of mirrors that that future requests can be redirected to. After all, it's not somebody would lie about a thing like that.

Re:Is access going to be free?

[betis70]

>>So.. Are these 5000 year old documents going to be freely available or will the database of texts be copyrighted/restricted?

If you can read cunieform you have access. If you don't, you better start learning. This is not a project for non-professionals - like Linux people, epigraphers would tell you to RTFM before you complain about not understanding what is written.

Re:Is access going to be free?

[morcego]

there are ways an ISP can setup a proxy so that it is completely transparent to the users.

Actualy, that is not true. I can testify for that once I'm one of the victims of the so called "Transparent Proxy". The only thing transparent about it is that you don't have to configure your browser to use it. Also, you have no option about NOT using it. So, we have problems trying to check if a site is up, or if the proxy server overloads. Or even if it crashes.
I, for once, I totaly agains these monsters.

Will we have to revise unicode?

[Ukab the Great]

With all these ancient language/hieroglyphic texts being archived, I have a feeling that we'll be hitting that 65536 character wall very shortly, since someone in the future might need that Cunieform version of M$ Word (hey, it could happen). Is it time for UTF-32?

Re:Will we have to revise unicode?

[dvdeug]

We've always had UTF-32. Due to some hacks in UTF-16, Unicode can include up to a million characters, more than anyone anticipates needing. Cuniform has already been (very) tenatively allocated to U+12800-U12C80. Apparently, no one has come up with a complete proposal for including cuniform, though.

Re:Will we have to revise unicode?

[hwilker]

See "Why Unicode Won't Work on the Internet: Linguistic, Political, and Technical Limitations" for more information on this. It argues that even Unicode 3.1 will not contain enough characters for just East Asian languages, never mind dead, Middle Asian ones.

The main reason seems to be that in East Asia, there are reduced character sets in daily use which contain only a couple of hundred or thousand glyphs, but to read and study classical texts, the number required quickly goes up into the tens of thousands, for each of a number of languages. Not having these glyphs in the Unicode set would be like asking English-speakers to use alphabets reduced by five or six characters (M and N are similar, X, Q, C and Z could be replaced by one character as well) and dictionaries from which three out of four words have been deleted due to redundancy or age.

The reason for this mis-design, the article argues, is political: the nationalities in question have never been asked how many characters they would need together -- for each single language, Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, a scholar would say "Sure! 50,000 characters is enough for us!"

Re:Will we have to revise unicode?

[smittyoneeach]

The reason for this mis-design...is political: the nationalities in question have never been asked how many characters they would need...

This is certainly a true statement, but it gets at a basic engineering tradeoff: performance verses inclusiveness.
Total inclusiveness isn't desireable for two reasons.
a) When it comes to dead languages, you have scholars who make their living arguing over fine points pertaining thereto, thus making a 'standard' a moving target. Attempts at total inclusiveness are an exercise in windmill jousting.
b) Even in a "broadband for all my friends" environment, the market (where the loot is) favors svelte technologies.
Prediction: the market partitions itself with the low end covered by Unicode, and more exotic technologies to favor the scholarly crowd.

Re:Will we have to revise unicode?

[dvdeug]

See "Why Unicode Will Work on the Internet". Basically, Unicode has more characters than just about any other character set - it includes 70,000 Han ideographs. All unified by a Japanese unification principle agreed to by all the pertinent Asian countries. All the Asian classics have been published in Unicode with their characters. This all, with over 800,000 code points to add new characters, if needs be.

Re:Will we have to revise unicode?

[iabervon]

There are Unicode character sets in the 32-bit range; the first 16 bits is only supposed to be used for current languages in active use. So cuniform, along with linear B, runic, and possibly Tolkien's runes (and, unofficially, klingon), will probably end up in the 0x1xxxx range.

UTF-8 is actually perfectly sufficient for 32-bit characters. (And you meant UCS-32; UTF-n is an n-bit/character encoding of >n-bit characters, while UCS-n is the n-bit character set).

Re:Will we have to revise unicode?

[Apotsy]

That article is complete crap. I can't believe anyone takes it seriously.

The author of that article doesn't seem to understnad the fact that Unicode is a character set, not a font. He also doesn't seem to understand how Unicode's surrogate pairs work (which allow for encoding of more than 1 million characters). He doesn't seem to understand that Unicode is an evolving standard (i.e., 3.1 is hardly the final version). And he doesn't seem to understand that UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, etc. are all just different formats, and they actually represent the exact same character set.

But most importantly, he is flat-out wrong about how and why the decisions were made regarding encoding of East Asian languages. He needs to learn about the history of Han unification for CJK characters. If he did, he would know that linguists and computer scientists from East Asian countries have been involved in Unicode since the beginning. The unification of East Asian characters was done on purpose, and has the full support of linguists, scholars, and computer scientists from those countries.

If the author of that article had just spent a few minutes reading the a copy of The Unicode Standard, he would not have made those mistakes. He didn't even have to read the whole thing! Just the Introduction and Appendix A would have set him straight on the issues I just mentioned. The fact that he didn't means this guy really shouldn't be doing work for a company with the word "Research" in the title.

Oh, and even though that page says the article has not been modified since June 4, you can see from the google cache that they have since removed their promise of responding to criticism.

And one more thing: Since he derides those mean old Westerners on the Unicode committee for being insensitive towards the peoples of East Asian countries, perhaps he should ask himself if it is considered impolite or insensitive to sweepingly refer to such peoples as "Oriental", which he does in the first few paragraphs.

"Face on Mars" like thing

[os2fan]

Remember when the pictures of Mars came out, and someone found the "face on Mars" in one of the prints.

Wonder how long it will be before someone finds something interesting here, and how long it will take to "doctor" it?

Alternately, how long will it take for someone to fake something.

XML, Writing and Jabber

[Jucius Maximus]

"Using SVG and XML to represent their documents. Similar efforts are underway for hieroglyphics."

They're using XML? They could integrate this with some sort of retrieval language and couple it with Jabber clients. That way you could send some sort of command-line search/retrieval command to the database using a regular Jabber client and have the XML data sent back, since Jabber natively supports the standard.

Re:XML, Writing and Jabber

[instinctdesign]

Well, the best answer to this one was provided on the hieroglyphics page. I'm not sure if it was slashdotted after I got it (the UCLA one was down just after the first comment was posted) so I'll post the majority here.

XML is a format which allow both to describe an encoding and to write encoded files. It was chosen for a number of reasons. First, it's easy to extend an XML format. Second, it's easy to parse an XML file, an there are a lot of tools for it: people will be able to manipulate XMLMCD files without being graduate in Computer Science. Third, XML is being used for a growing number of applications --- for instance web browsers. Fourth, there's a user community for XML in the philological world : two interesting examples are the Text Encoding Initiative and the recent conference on XML and Ancient Near East.

Re:XML, Writing and Jabber

[Anonymous Coward]

You could do the same thing with HTTP too. I mean Jabber's great for live conversation but for a search request it has no particular features - right?

...

[evel aka matt]

How Snowcrash.

It appears that...

[Teancom]

they are also writing their tcp packets on clay tablets, and attempting to send them down the wire. That was the quickest /.'ing I've *ever* seen.

Cunieform writing

[Alien54]

Slashed already

[smile]

Scientific American has this article on Information Technology, 2500 B.C. on what life was like for the information worker of that day.

As many as half a million cuneiform tablets, hand size up to book-page size, are now available around the world. Surely many more are waiting to be found. Those samples are of every quality: once prized accounts and receipts, schoolboys' lessons, litigation profound or droll, literary essays, erotica, mathematics--and entire ancient epics, centuries older than Father Abraham's. A mostly unread treasury, comprising the equivalent of tens of thousands of large printed volumes.

Looks like there could be a lot of fun and good stuff there.

First case of poor infrastructure planning...

[gregwbrooks]

"640 clay tablets is enough for anyone!"

-- William "Scorpion King" Gates

Re:First case of poor infrastructure planning...

[GdoL]

Just ONE clay tablet with LCD screen is enough for anyone!!

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

"More than 5,000 years ago, the very first information revolution occurred when some unknown research team in Mesopotamia found a way to download and store language through a killer application called "writing.". The cuneiform digital library will have 60,000 texts ready in a couple of years. Using SVG and XML to represent their documents.

Sooo... this project has been going on for about 5,000 years, they're finally going to be making a large release in a few years, and we're *JUST NOW* hearing about this?

My *god*, talk about keeping the PR lid on tight!

Actually...

[recursiv]

Unicode is often referred to as a 16-bit system, which would allow for only 65,536 characters, but by reserving some code points for mapping into additional 16-bit planes, it has the potential to cope with over one million unique characters.

The current version (3.1) of the Unicode Standard, developed by the Unicode Consortium, assigns a unique identifier to each of 94,140 characters

XML? Thank god it's not MS Word

[Anonymous Coward]

...or else the uhh.. because... uhmm..
Oh, what the hell.

Micro$oft sucks.

is anyone else as offended...

[Anonymous Coward]

...by the pretentious language used to trick up something that doesn't need to be jazzed up with references to modern digi-whiz-bang this-and-that?

come on, cuneiform is damn neat all by itself. no need to make cutesy-ass references to the digital internet web cyberspace whatever.

XML is a poor choice for cuneiform

[Waffle Iron]

IIRC, cuneiform writing is composed entirely of angle brackets. To write this in XML, every character is going to have to be escaped!

Re:XML is a poor choice for cuneiform

[jallen02]

Thats why.. They are using SVG! The XML can be used to store meta data or even the document with the SVG references for the cuneiform characters.

Run through an XSLT transformation.. Voila... HTML or PDF representing the cuneiform document (Do texts written in cuneiform qualify as documents??!? ;).

Jeremy

Re:XML is a poor choice for cuneiform

[Anonymous Coward]

i sure hope you are joking :-P

re: erm...

[Binary Tree]

This is how.

all bound for mu-mu land

[rfsayre]

"justified.dtd" >

The cuneiforms are justified and ancient.
and well formed.

XML is gonna rock you.

Re:Hey!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure about VA Systems, Mr Katz, but Komodo is quite a nice XML editor and it's available for Windows and Linux. It understands the syntax of PHP, Perl, XML, XSL, TCL, and JavaScript languages and has syntax highlighting for Ada,
Batch,
C#,
C++,
Diff,
Eiffel,
HTML,
IDL,
Java,
JavaScript,
LaTex,
Lisp,
Lua,
Makefile,
PHP,
Pascal,
Perl,
Python,
Ruby,
SQL,
TCL,
Text,
VisualBasic,
XML,
XLST.

Have a really good day, Mr Katz.

XML Hieroglyphics

[darkov]

I believe the ancient Egyptians avoiding using XML at the time because of concerns over RAND licencing and prefered the patent-free ideograms.

No, really.

Should story links also have [url] notation?

[KNicolson]

I was worried I might end up here instead...

Re:Should story links also have [url] notation?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Should story links also have [url] notation?"

No, the /. editors always check the links, and other stated facts, in the submission before it gets approved. That's the editor's job after all.

This article was approved by Michael and he's one of the best, so you really didn't need to have been worried.

Re:Should story links also have [url] notation?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a case where a porn site was linked to from slashdot. Geekizoid were laughing for weeks after that :(

Re:Should story links also have [url] notation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please refer to this and this.

Thank you.

Slashdotted HARD!

[fodi]

Dammit... I want to look at old books and stuff, but they're web server is going... very.... very... slow.....

....ooops... it... just... died....

Lets all of us try and hit it again in exactly 12 hours, hey?

XML Overrated?

[ffatTony]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what is XML doing that some homegrown solution couldn't? Obviously clients would have to know the protocol, but with XML that is also the case.

I use XML all the time, maily because of XSLT, but I think its less functional and more hype. Feel free to enlighten me.

Re:XML Overrated?

[Anonymous Coward]

What advantages would a homegrown solution have?

Re:XML Overrated?

[ukryule]

When you're coding up ancient writing, you want to store much more information about each character or word than with normal text (colour, angle, depth etc.). XML is quite good at storing these attributes, so it makes sense to use it.

Taking a quote from the heiroglyphics link (can't comment on the cuneiform link as it's /.ed):

Let's illustrate these points. In the current MCD, data about an individual sign is scattered around it. Look for example at :

=A1\\r1 -i

It means "Sign Gardiner A1", as both grammatical and word ending, reversed, rotated. fine positional data, colour data, and more are hard to add. On the other hand, the current proposal would represent the same sequence as

<hieroglyph code="A1" gramend="y" wordend="y" rot="90" reversed="y">
<hieroglyph code="i">

Of course, as with any use of XML, you could do it with a 'homegrown' solution, but the point is that using XML gives you a well known (and well supported) framework which everyone can standardise on. (And yes I know the XML in the example is malformed ...)

Re:XML Overrated?

[mike_sucks]

Hmm, how about becuase XML and SVG are well defined standards that already have a huge amount of software available for it?

Or, because XML is increasingly used in other applications, hence interoperability is not only high right now, but is also getting higher?

But perhaps it is because XML is very well suited to representing diverse forms of data.

I dunno..

Pishaw!

[dimator]

the very first information revolution occurred when some unknown research team in Mesopotamia found a way to download and store language through a killer application called "writing."

Talk about dead projects. I mean, freshmeat has nothing on these guys. 5,000 years, and how many upgrades? I'm STILL using writing 1.0, for chrissakes, not because it's better, but because there are no other versions!

Protocol implementation

[xant]

Clients would have to know and implement the protocol. But since XML always looks the same, implementing the protocol is just a matter of linking the standard XML library in the language of your choice and using the DTD to decide what you want your client to understand.

There's other advantages, but that's a big one.

Missing marks

[os2fan]

Unfortunately, the documents must be transscribed, which means that we may well miss out on the doodles and other things that gets written with writing.

Consider, for example, the carry dots that some people use to add up numbers. Dots and things like that in the text may well uncover the way that calculations were done.

Re:Missing marks

[mdransfield]

The marks need not necessarily be missed out on transcription. If they're using the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines. TEI allows extra-linguistic marks to be captured alongside the text.

Re:Missing marks

[rodentia]

Considering that these materials were typically baked or kiln-fired to ensure permanency, it is unlikely that there is much in the way of doodles and annotation. Such ephemera were lost with the next rains.

Interestingly, the developers of cuneiform also developed the first envelopes. The main message was kiln-fired and then wrapped with a new layer of clay, the address incised and the result merely air-dried. The recipient then gave the lot a crack against a nearby stone and brushed away the *envelope* to read his mail.

Re:A classic... why do more trolls not use this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who sung that?

Re:A classic... why do more trolls not use this?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.deathrock.com/tsol/lyrics.html

Who supports SVG?

[roystgnr]

I haven't looked in almost a year now, but the last time I did, there was an alpha (rendered lots of graphics correctly, lots incorrectly) patch for Mozilla and no SVG support for IE or any other browser. Did everybody catch up while I wasn't looking?

Re:Who supports SVG?

[thbzcrt]

Adobe has a plug-in for IE and many nice SVG demos. Unfortunately the plug-in is not integrated into IE, so you have to download it.

IE directly supports VML (try it here if you are using IE), which does more or less the same as SVG except that it's older, not standardized, and only supported by Microsoft.

Re:Who supports SVG?

[bowb]

The Adobe SVG Viewer plug-in is included with the Acrobat Reader download now, so it should be on a lot more computers soon.

Also, there's Batik, which is a Java-based SVG viewer plus some other tools.

VML does much less than SVG; it's pretty primitive in comparison. And it seems to have stagnated -- MS hasn't updated their support for it in IE for a long time.

Time to upgrade

[ukryule]

I know it's bad form to criticise someones writing on /. but it really is time for you to catch up with modern developments ... Version 1.0 (codename cuneiform) has long been superceded by 2.0 (codename Heiroglyphics), 3.0 (greek), and 3.1 (latin).

While there is still some support for all sub-releases of version 3, I suggest you upgrade to the latest release (3.1.27 - 'joined up alphanumeric').

Of course there has been some criticism of the 'open source' nature of the writing project with claims that it leads to too many active branches (most notably with interoperability issues with the popular 'Chinese', 'Arabic' and 'Roman' branches).

Scarier than Snowcrash

[Anonymous Coward]

And I just took that book out of the library to re-read again....very bizarre....

First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

On this lovely Thursday.

SVG is XML

[joonasl]

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is subset of XML. Stating that something is stored in SVG AND XML format is a tautology.

Re:SVG is XML

[Anonymous Coward]

since you're so freakin bright, let me enlighten you. SVG is an application of XML, not a subset of it. unless you're trying to say that the set of all possible SVG documents is a subset of all possible XML documents, but that would just be silly.

the project mentioned in the article intends to use SVG, as well as other applications of XML. so while stating "SVG and XML" may not have been quite correct, you see it gets awkward to say "SVG and some other XML using a different schema that we made expressly for this purpose."

Re:SVG is XML

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh don't be pedantic. He probably meant a superset.

XML for Ancients?

[brad-d]

All I can think of now is the new book series:

"XML for Mummies"

At least in this case when you see the reviews "this book will put you to sleep" it really doesn't matter.

ICE

[zephc]

the xml.org link for cuneiform encoding initiative is at http://www.jhu.edu/ice/

There is an initiative for almost every ancient language that is know (and decipherable). I'm sure digging thru xml.org will turn up a bounty of results =]

Re:ICE

[Anonymous Coward]

how is this a troll?

Re:erm...

[fux0rz]

all your stoopid hemrons belong to l ron cupboard

authenticiation

[paai]

Claytablets also had a very good way of authenticiation: "...The task of preserving the integrity of the records, incidentally, posed the problem of how to prevent
unauthorized changes. Seals were in wide use, but the Assyrians invented a system of wrapping the
clay tablet with a contract in a second layer of clay and copying the contract again on the enveloppe.
In case of disagreement on the authenticity of the text on the outer layer, this layer was broken and
the inside could be inspected. As there was no way of changing the inside tablet without damaging
the outer layer beyond repair, this offered an early but very effective way of authenticiation ..."

Hans Paijmans

Copyright is 70 years on books 8)

[da5idnetlimit.com]

So a 5000 years original text should be no problem.

The case will happen if you ask for the translation (What, you are not Cuneiform litterate ? Talk about education 8)

Maybe a loop here ...

[da5idnetlimit.com]

As it says in Snowcrash, cuneiform is just a succession of 1 & 0s...

I mean, about just the same as todays computers...

Maybe we could try and feed the Enki story to a computer...

did they have the slashdot effect ...

[shaunak]

So, did they have the slashdot effect back then? Umm, like 100 scholars trying to access a single clay tablet at the same time? Did the clay tablet crash? Wait a minute - did I just give an anology where slashdotters were scholars? Woah, must have regular dose of caffine before I make more 'horrendous mistakes'.

Sonny Bono Act

[yerricde]

Copyright is 70 years on books

No, 95 years on all works first published on or after January 31, 1923. See also Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. And it'll get even longer before 2020 as Di$ney frantically bribes Congre$$ to pass yet another corporate-welfare copyright extension.

The case will happen if you ask for the translation

...even into XML.

English works just fine with only 18 letters

[yerricde]

Not having these glyphs in the Unicode set would be like asking English-speakers to use alphabets reduced by five or six characters (M and N are similar, X, Q, C and Z could be replaced by one character as well)

Spelling reform. China (outside Taiwan) has had it. It's perfectly possible to write English with only 18 letters.

and dictionaries from which three out of four words have been deleted due to redundancy or age

So? Desk dictionaries aren't nearly as comprehensive as Oxford English Dictionary or even the unabridged Webster's Third New International Dictionary.

Data and Ceramics

[YeOldeCurmudgeon]

Gosh, here's the perfect topic for Ye Olde Curmudgeon!

Weren't the old drum storage systems used in the 1960's a ceramic structure coated with magentic surface? And that was an improvement on those birch bark 80 column cards.

But now we have advanced ceramics used in various other electronic media. And we measure our mean time between failure in hours.

So, how far have we really come in the last 5,000 years? They had fire and clay and their data remains readable after 5,000 years. We have lightening and clay and can't read data from 15 years ago and hard drives can fail in a flash.

Why aren't we planning storage and retrieval systems that can last thousands of years? Is it because our technical culture only values the last 2 to 3 years? How will we answer to our children when they can't figure out what we did 25 or 50 years from now? And I don't think we can blame it all as a planned obsolescence feature of Microsoft...well, maybe not all of it!

ohhhh baby

[revxul]

i certainly hope its a freely available public resource... i've been studying cuneiform texts (mainly Sumerian myths) for a couple years now and an archive like that would.. well the idea lossens my bowels and excites my senses! in other words i damn near crapped myself with joy when i read that.

How Modern

[rakerman]

Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform

Re:How Modern

[bartle]

Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform

But it still won't help you learn about Caractacus's uniform. You've got to keep these things in perspective.

Speaking of Sig's..

[Anonymous Coward]

My father worked as a bank manager for some time. he was signing things every couple of _seconds_. As a result his sig now resembles a stylized 'R' with a squigle that he can write faster then you'd think possible. It's also, nearly, impossible to forge (hey, we all went through school, no? ;P)

obvious question ...

[bob_jenkins]

Did they find exactly who invented writing? What are the earliest statements they've found? What do they say?

Re:obvious question ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"This stele intentionally left blank."

Similar efforts for "hieroglyphics"

[Toliaro]

Actually, they're called "hieroglyphs," and the writing is called "hieroglyphic writing." This is according to The Oriental Institute in Chicago.

Obvious answer

[TheInternet]

What are the earliest statements they've found? What do they say?

"First post"

- Scott