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5000 year-old Cuneiform tablets Go Digital
purduephotog writes "In an effort to preserve and expose scholars around the world to rapidly plundered historical texts, a joint project between the University of California and the Max Planck Institute have photographed and digitized around 60,000 tablets. An overview is available at ABCNews, while the main site can be found at at UCLA." The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets.
They should encode the digital version of the clay tablets on to clay tablets.
Because of plundering and damage to irreplacable texts, the Library of Congress should follow suit and digitize major portions of their collection.
hehehehhhh.... he said cuniform.... (shut up, Beavis)
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Anyone for antiquated dominoes?
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
Cuneiform is awl write!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
rapidly plundered historical texts"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if they've already been plundered, isn't it too late?
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
"The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets."
How is this Ironic?
The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets.
Like people will still be using digital technology 5000 years from now. At least they could probably tell what a clay tablet is. Digital storage devices, there's no telling what they would think they are.
"The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets."
Uuuh, well, the interesting part will be to see if these digitized images of the actual tablets will be still used in 5/10/100 years, while in another 4,000 years the rocks will most likely still be readable.
Gene Gragg, director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute says "It's like being able to walk into the tablet room of a museum and pick up the actual tablets", which I've read alot on these types of projects.
That's like saying if you've seen the Grand Canyon on TV there's no need to go there, or if you've seen pictures of the top of Mt. Everest there's no need to try and climb it.
Seeing a picture of something is fine, but being able to touch something that was written 4,000 years ago is a much different experience. Funny how people seem to think a representation of something is just as good as seeing it in real life.
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
2001-11-18 05:34:01 Where Can I Get a Windows XP Crack? (askslashdot,xmas) (rejected)
2001-11-25 01:57:29 Ask a Troll! (interviews,news) (rejected)
2001-12-02 00:52:00 Linux: A Giant Turd! (articles,linux) (rejected)
2001-12-09 04:12:43 GPL: Intellectual Protection or Intellectual Theft (articles,announce) (rejected)
2001-12-12 20:36:14 Jon Katz: Asshobbit or Cockgnome? (articles,editorial) (rejected)
2001-12-24 01:51:51 Hydrophobia and Nerds (science,ed) (rejected)
2001-12-30 02:41:46 Which Slashdot editor has a thing for transexuals? (articles,xmas) (rejected)
2002-05-04 20:06:04 Masturbating at Work? (askslashdot,ed) (rejected)
2002-05-11 21:21:15 Fastest way to remove Linux from my PC (articles,linux)
2002-05-17 01:19:40 Jon Katz: Pederast? (science,announce) (rejected)
Please note that the article entitled "Fastest way to remove Linux from my PC" has not been rejected. It appears that the editors have finally realized what snakeoil the Gnu/Linux OS is and are considering my article on how to remove it from ones PC. For once I applaud Taco & others. Congrats for doing the right thing!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
I guess it depends in which format they save the digitized copies. If they are .doc, I really don't believe they will be useful for as long as the clay tablets have been around.
Maybe they should bring in Jacob Nielson to advise them to save it in strict ASCII.
Wouldn't want 10000 year dead people pissed off now would we?
... Are they going to be required to have an oracle license for each one of the 5000 yr old dead guys that originally created the tablets?
Sign up for AOL version 1.0 and recieve 5 free hours per month! -Ed docbrown.net
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
These tablets lasted 5000 yrs, and are still readable. Just TRY to find a way to read a CDR or any other "modern" format in 50 years!!!
The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets.
What are you talking about? Of course the tablets will last longer. But the benefits of the digital copies are pretty nice:
1. easy to share
2. Try setting a real clay block as your desktop background image.
But it's got downsides:
1. less valuable - the real clay tablets could probably fetch you a good deal, at least on the black market, the digital ones are probably already on freenet/gnutella...
2. vulnerable to static electricity...
In an effort to preserve and expose scholars around the world
So they're filling academics with formaldehyde and stripping them naked? Sounds like quite a Party!
Let's not forget the last time someone tried to preserve something digitally...
I'd hate to be the student that had to carry all 60,000 tablets to school, must have been a pretty big book bag...
What OS do you want to abuse today?
They clearly need to be saved in XML!
The thieves steal from you and me Archive everything
Almost certinaly they won't - the article at Salon mentions the digital encoding of Cuneiform images started in the 1970's in Berlin with punch-cards. Given that the technology we used only 30 years ago is already obsolete, what are the odds that in 4 millenia we'll still have the digital versions in a readable format?
I'd sooner bet on Gates and co. releasing an open-source version of Windoze...
"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1801
...when they gave the university a grant to develop a new sort of web tablet.
Tablets even show up on Web auction site eBay, where bidding can start at $1.
Those cuneiform tablets are going for about $100 - $300 on ebay. I bet they'd make a great conversation piece. Not that I'd ever buy one. That would make me one of the plunder-ers.
The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/ be usable longer then the clay tablets.
...than the clay tablets.
My thingy is bigger than your thingy.
First we'll have lunch, then we'll storm the embassy.
...the really interesting thing about this is that the entire project is being funded by L. Bob Rife...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Tablet 12843 begins: "MAKE MONEY FAST"
Tablet 34935 has:
>>>> me too!
>>>
>>> me too!
>> Me Too
>
> ME TOO
--
I think that four fifths of the tablets are actually "Cuneispam".
Um, no. I promise the tablets will last longer, for reasons that should be so obvious, I'm not even going to bother listing them.
One fear a collegue of mine has is that we digitize everything and call those the cannonical versions, and then thousands of years in the future we're unable to cull accounting, historical, cultural information from this age cause it all gets lost in digital form. The fact that digical copies are much more likely to be lost while undergoing simple administrative tasks ('oops, I hit delete instead of copy') makes it even more likely that my assertion is true. Yet another case of having a hammer and making every problem a nail.
Whats the real solution? Make tons of copies, in tons of mediums, from digital to physical. That's my suggestion for historical data. And who'd do this?! US, while enjoying the works. Unfortunately, that wouldn't jive for the works of a dude whos been dead and should have had his works return to public domain awhile ago (or at least a few years ago, but Sonny Bono deep-sixed that one, as I understand it) - we face a real danger of having a very thin and fragile anthropological record centuries from now due to the current century vogue of being exeedingly restrictive with the distribution of cultural works.
"Old man yells at systemd"
"In other news, the Nam-Shub of Enki has been released onto the internet and is being rapidly disseminated through P2P file sharing. An increasing number of computer users are suffering from a strange neurological affliction the authorities have designated "Snow Crash". The Neurolinguistic Hackers' Association sent out a press release saying 'We told you this was going to happen sooner or later'."
Freedom: "I won't!"
Just get the originals and stick them in your floppy drive. It'll work, no really it will. Will Smith showed me.
We went to the park the other day
But the park was closed, we walked away
We brought many things to eat
Fruits and soda, even meat
But we have to wait
We were told the park was beautiful
We were told the park was so nice
Someday we'll go back again
We'll have a party, please bring your friends
We'll have lots of things to eat
Fruits and soda, even meat
We'll have a party then
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Than! It's than! Not then. I wouldn't be so annoyed if the
comparing -> than
time-related, therefore, etc. -> then
I mean, Taco even got this wrong when he proposed to Kathleen!
Larry Wall did Perl already in the 80s.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Getting stalked by one of these madmen is not fun, let me tell you!
Apparently there's a glut of these, and they have been available on eBay as cheap paperweights, starting at $1. I don't have a link, and I don't much care, so you'll have to do your own eBay / Google search.
Infuriate left and right
truly eternal? I mean what media is not subject to destruction?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Take two of these and call me next millenia.
Sorry, had to do it.
Tcd004
Note this link about how an attempt to preserve an ancient book digitally ended in the ironic situation years later where the digital format was obsolete and unreadable after little more than a decade, while the ancient book was still fine.
The real problem with bit entropy can only be solved (if you ask me) by having the information regularly copied and used by at least some people [who will thus bother to migrate it into the new super-dense holographic optical processors all the kids will be using in 2080, who probably wouldn't even recognize the purpose of a shiny little 5cm disk if their lives depended on it].
The continuance of the historical record may well be a victim of excessive IP protection and laws like the DMCA, as much as that sounds like a somewhat far-fetched possibility today. Only info in an open format that is 'mirrored' by many people [and kept freshly copied into modern devices] would likely prevent this.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
I've always gotten a kick out of the fact the oldest known writings have predominently consisted of the inventories and banking statements of the Summerians. It really gives me tangible way to relate to a group of humans who lived 5000 years ago. I doubt that they used the phrase 'bounced
And now that I'm thinking about it, does anyone know if cuniform is considered the first written language? If so, It seems very suprising that writing wasn't invented thousands of years before that, assuming humans have basically had the same capacity for intelligent behavior for 40,000 years (Assuming the theory of evolution as laid out by my HS text books).
I think these guys need to check the copyright laws before they go copying some guys work.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Good think we're digitizing these tablets, so that the Nam-shub of Enki will be around to liberate us from a biological/computer virus when the time is right.
Now, all we need is a Hiro...
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets.
People, this is a RHETORICAL statement, meant to imply that the tablets will last longer. Your "Um, no, the TABLETS will last longer, asshole" posts are not pointing out the idiocy of the Slashdot editors, but instead pointing out your own second grade reading level.
I scarfed these from a website whose URL I lost. I hope they are in the public domain since they are over 4,000 years old. And yes I read _Snow Crash_ by Neal Stephenson.
Ancient Sumerian Proverbs
These gems of wisdom are more than 4,000 years old, but many of them still have relevance to us today.
In a city that has no watch dogs,the fox is the overseer.
Who possesses much silver may be happy;
who possesses much barley may be glad;
but he who has nothing at all may sleep.
Flatter a young man, he give you anything;
Throw a scrap to a dog, he'll wag his tail.
The poor men are the silent men in Sumer.
Writing is the mother of eloquence and the father of artists.
Pay heed to the word of your mother as though it were the word of a god.
A sweet word is everybody's friend.
Friendship lasts a day, kinship forever.
For a man's pleasure there is marriage;
on thinking it over, there is divorce.
Conceiving is nice; pregnancy is irksome.
The wife is a man's future;
the son is a man's refuge;
the daughter is a man's salvation;
the daughter-in-law is a man's devil.
If you take the field of an enemy,the enemy will come and take your field.
Who builds like a lord, lives like a slave.
Who builds like a slave, lives like a lord.
Be gentle to your enemy as to an old oven.
Do not return evil to your adversary; maintain justice for your enemy, do good things, be kind all your days. What you say in haste you may regret later.
Making loans is as [easy] as making love, but repaying them is as hard as bearing a child.
Go up to the ancient ruin heaps and walk around; look at the skulls of the lowly and the great. Which belongs to someone who did evil and which to someone who did good?
A thing which has not occurred since time mmemorial: a young woman broke wind in her husband's embrace.
Who has not supported a wife or child, his nose has not borne a leash.
Eat no fat and you will not have blood in your excrement.
Commit no crime, and fear [of your god] will not consume you.
Has she become pregnant without intercourse? Has she become fat without eating?
Bride, [as] you treat your mother-in-law, so will women [later] treat you.
If the beer mash is sour, how can the beer be sweet?
He who changes, neglects, transgresses, erases the words of this tablet, may the great gods of heaven and earth, who inhabit the world, all those that are named in this tablet, strike you down, look with disfavor upon you, may they chase you away from both shade and sunlight so that you cannot take refuge in a hidden corner, may food and drink forsake you, and hunger, want, famine and pestilence never leave you, may the bellies of dogs and pigs be your burial place, let tar and pitch be your food, donkey urine your drink, naphtha your ointment, river rushes your covers, and evil spirits, demons, and lurkers select your houses (as their abode).
The gods alone live forever under the divine sun; but as for mankind, their days are numbered, all their activities will be nothing but wind.
You can have a lord, you can have a king, but the man to fear is the tax collector!
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Goddammit. Does that mean that I have to vote for the insane conservatives like Ann "Nazi" Coulter?
My initial reaction? "Absurd. Ancient artifacts just cannot be stored accurately in digital form." But I have since reconsidered. If you think about it, many researchers, scholars, and other academics need access only to the textual information contained in these precious artifacts. If this information is provided electronically, then they will not have to use the actual piece, and the risk of damage is lessened. I support this wholeheartedly.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Are there still female geeks who actually want to have sex with the male of the species or are they all lesbians?
We could update the digital format from time to time? Doesn't seem like that difficult a proposition. Take the TIFF's or however they're preserved, and update them to whatever the most current digital format is available.
Today Judge Jamison heard opening arguments in the case King Tut vs Digital Tablet INC in which King Tut accuses Digital Tablet of making a circumvention device according to the DMCA.
Initial arguments attempted to show that rampant pirating of ancient works, mathematics and embalming techniques have hurt King Tut and Egypt due to the digitizing of the ancient Tablets
The books are not just stolen from the library, they're stolen from everyone who pays taxes, and the knowledge within is stolen from everybody.
Many posts of touched on the concept that actually "holding" the object and "feeling" it can yeild more information. This may be true. There is also a digital alternative:
Stereo Lithography!
Bet this stuff lasts as long as the clay...
-Jhon
I think that they should take the data and put it onto Anakin gets his arm chopped off by Count Dooku!! HAHAAH SPOILED SUCKERS!
Digitizing (and eventually being able to view online I hope) means that I can avoid having to drive to museums far away, wait for travelling displays, or become part of the overall problem and buy one of these tablets on eBay.
Imagine if we had the technology to digitize the contents of the library in Alexandria before it was destroyed, or scan texts before the European dark age and subsequent destruction of intellectual advances.
For a good example, consider the Book of Kells at Trinity College in Dublin. While I actually went there to see it (and you can only see about ten actual paes if I recall), you can see the entire folio by buying the CD from the College. I went because I wanted to be there, but for those not fortunate enough to make the trip, this is a more cost effective means.
you don't have to outrun the bear, just the slowest person in your group.
The text is on stone tablets so that it can be read with a high-tech stonereader tool. This is a device that, you must admit, not everyone has.
By digitizing these tablets, you are circumventing a technological measure that controls access to the work. That is something that only criminals do.
This is really interesting to browse. Quite a large undertaking. I did find one strange thing though. I saw this tablet where I could make out the following message: All your base are belong... then... indecipherable.
Oh well, I guess we shall never know
I Heart Sorting Networks
Most folks have never heard of it, but the Perseus Project at Tufts University should be the model for the digital cuneiform library. Perseus started in the early 90s as a digital repository of texts, photos, maps, and other reference material of classical (i.e. Latin and ancient Greek) materials. (It has since expanded into other, more recent subjects, but Latin & Greek remain at its core.) Tufts has made a name for itself on the digital library/archival forefront, and they could probably provide lots of useful advice, tools, and frameworks for the cuneiform library.
One thing that the article didn't mention is just what "digitizing" means for these texts. The simplest way to do this is to store high-res photos of each tablet. Even better would be some sort of 3D imaging, because if you've ever seen cuneiform artefacts, you know that they're often in odd shapes (seal rings, stelae, as well as tablets and tablet "envelopes"), and/or broken or cracked in numerous places. But an even bigger question remains: can/will these tablets be digitized into some machine-readable format? Can cuneiform symbols be represented in Unicode? Unlike Latin and Greek works, the vast majority of cuneiform artefacts remain untranslated, but having a machine-readable format for characters can be a huge step for constructing some sort of machine translator. (I, for one, would love to work on something like this; I already work on machine learning of modern language texts.)
:wq
Metaverse mogul Bob L. Rife held a press conference today to emphasize that there is no truth to the rumors of mind-destroying metalinguistic viruses in ancient Sumerian clay tablets. Local hackers expressed relief. "I was worried there for a while, but I'm sure Mr. Rife is telling the tru ba ga de me po ta da..."
What would make more sense is to physically copy the tablets onto a very long lasting material. I am not a materials scientist but wouldn't stainless steel or something of that nature be a good material to use to save copies the tablets.
according to their meta-tag. some poor student seems to have knocked this archive online with BBedit5.0.
who says long bearded scientists are smart? ever heard about a database?
This is wonderful!! I have long suspected that the prior art for the "one click" patent could be found in cuneiform tablets. Now we may have the opportunity to verify my suspicion. (I think the one click patent is nothing more than a computerized version of the "open account", for which merchant records probably exist in cuneiform.)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
(this is a 100% authentic beowulf troll - hint: you can tell by the subject. Accept no substitutes!)
adobe will create a new font called "cuneiform"
if the tablets aren't copied in the proper order or if they are sold something terrible will happen
Most people have trouble understanding that.
:
My favorite saying in that vein
"The Map is not the territory"
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C (this is apparently whay Kathleen did to Taco on their honeymoon; lord have mercy on our souls)
Many of these tablets are damaged, or broken into several parts which you would have to hunt down and combine to see the whole story. Also, cuneiform writers tended not to care much about rules of typography (which hadn't been invented yet :), so they considered it no big deal if long sentences wrapped around the edges of a tablet.
In addition, there are clues in the manner of writing (care, proficiency, emphasis) that may help when interpreting a text, for example to identify mistakes in the original, or to decide whether it's an original composition or a student copying from a reference work. Sometimes you need clues just to tell where the word boundaries are.
For such things, I expect that the actual tablet would be far more helpful than a picture of the text (let alone a transcription).
FWIW, I'm not an archaeologist, I just read the books.
At risk of not just losing all it's context, but of being so distributed that should today's knowledge ever be lost it may never be assembled again.
The world needs caches of information...history, of course, but also physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, language, which are redundant, widespread, and not easy, but not impossibly difficult either, to find. To ensure that no matter what happens, if all intellectual progress of the last few thousand years is lost, it can be regained.
Include the largest amount of data in whatever the most durable available digital format is. (It might have to be some custom format specifically for this project...so that hopefully the data and the devices for reading the data could survive sitting around for a millenium or two)
Include less data, but more critical, on acid-free paper. A small library of science and history texts, and maybe some literature too.
Include the most critical information...physical laws and constants, maybe some brief historical summaries, carved into stone or clay, or perhaps lead (though that would be at risk of melting where stone wouldn't)
For a Rosetta Stone, include copies of some text likely to be known even thousands of years from now, at least to scholars. That pretty much means religious texts. Copies with translations as literal as possible while still making sense, in languages likely to persist, or at least likely to have related languages persist. All the biggest languages in the world today.
Include complete copies on paper, and brief sections on stone.
If these caches get put anywhere that people live and are likely to continue to reside, make them really boring looking, so no one cares.
Future scholars might thank us.
that the tablet I just looked at had the DeCSS code enscribed on it.
Someone you trust is one of us.
This statement got me thinking. It would be an interesting project to connect some sort of laser-etching (or even type-hammering) device to a computer so that Project Gutenberg text can be transferred to thin, metal sheets. These sheets could be specially treated for corrosion. The process could be nearly completely automated, with a binding and packaging step to ensure long-term survival of the information.
You would need to put a considerable amount of time and expense into designing and building the process, but in the end you would create an archive for historians far into the future.
And I was just thinking, "Hey! I need to go online and look up ancient cuneiform tablets, but first, to slashdot!"
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
Do they have the rights to do this? After all it should be up to the people who made these tablets to decide in what format they get to be used. Furthermore this copying and sharing with multiple users is certainly a copyright violation.
Many congratulations are yours!
That on tablet 5,532 there is the first known operating version of Vi. The original scribes had talked about installing Emacs but not enough clay could be drawn from the river to compile the byte-code.
What is music when you despise all sound?
I just finished writing to cdli@ucla.edu about the photos. Artistically they are very good. For use in a computer program to help put the pieces back together (Yeah! I know! They aren't just one big puzzle but are a lot of small puzzles.) they are not so good. The problem is that the pictures are artistic in nature. Only a single light source was used which means that some of the edges of the tablet pieces can't be easily determined. What should have been done is to have a light source at the top, bottom, left, and right sides of the pictures so the entire tablet piece is shown clearly. The black background makes a good offset to each piece because the pieces are definitely a different color than the black background. As it is, the pictures are nice to look at but would be hard to use in a puzzle program IMHO. :-/
It could decipher some amazing things ;)
therefore, it is our solemn duty to destroy these weapons of mass destruction, so that we will not anihilate ourselves...
If I can learn to read these, I'll be cunilingual, right?
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
It's less an issue of upgrading the data to a new format, than it is the original resolution of the data in its old format.
For example, let's say that pictures of the tablets were made at 1200dpi, 24-bit color.
In the future, this will be considered low-res, as we now consider 72-dpi 256-color GIFs to be low-res.
(Already, at least one of the new generation of graphics cards (due out this summer) will have 30 bits of color, instead of the current 24.)
Imagine converting an old GIF into a TIFF or PNG.
You really would notice the difference between it and something more recently scanned.
Then there is additional information that a TIFF doesn't provide in any form, e.g., a height map.
If all you want to read is the text itself, then a textual encoding is sufficient, and can be easily updated to new formats when warranted.
(Purely "literary" works like Shakespeare or the LOC are prime candidates for this procedure.)
But it's the information that current formats don't provide (e.g., higher resolution, 3D (holographic representation), material composition and density, spectographs, etc.) that make it worhwhile to re-digitize the original each generation, if the new generation adds additional capabilities (which it often does).
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Seems like every few years, somebody has to trot out the tablet-based computing idea. =)
Why not Cyberwaring them?
Hammurabi's cuneidot ID is 526823. The other Hammurabi is an imposter
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
(This doesn't have anything to do with the article, but it's the closest thing to my idea that I've seen on /.)
Whenever you are on a dig and find an artifact or shards of one(lamp, pot, bowl, etc), you start looking them up in catalogs from other digs. This helps you determine the time period the pieces are from and the area that they were probably made in.
The books are HUGE and the work is extremely tedious.
My idea was to automate the search. If you used a 3D scanner on all shards that you have found, they could be compared to a database of shapes. It would only return a probability that the shard was from the indicated object, but it would drastically cut down the number of objects a archeaolgist would have to sift through.
Another benefit would be that the model could be sent to collegues, giving them a chance to get a more detailed look at an artifact as soon as it is unearthed.
If anybody out there wants to take this idea and run with it, you would be dong archeaology a huge favor.
-Eric
Seeing a picture of something is fine, but being able to touch something that was written 4,000 years ago is a much different experience. Funny how people seem to think a representation of something is just as good as seeing it in real life.
The representation can be just as good as the real thing if you only need to get a percentage of the content out of it. Let's leave the very real issue of how well the reproduced medium will survive aside for the moment (others have discussed this). If you just want to read the content, or get some practice at reading cunieform, then a digitised image will be just fine. Thousands of undergraduate students all over the world can gain experience and knowledge without flying to USA or UK or Iraq or wherever the originals are. And they will gain a lot of benefit from them.
It's a bit like books really. I am happy to pick up a cheap second hand paperback copy of a book if my friends have all told me how great it is and I have a long train journey. I might think about travelling to London and looking at a first edition copy if I was a student of printing, interested in the paper and ink and binding. Depends on what you are researching.