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.

Comments

The Ironic Part?

[LISNews]

"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.

Re:The Ironic Part?

[CaffeineAddict2001]

Funny that you mention it. When I looking at the grand canyon, the first thing that came to mind was "wow, it's like looking at a gigantic picture."

Re:The Ironic Part?

[bluGill]

True, but if everyone who lived in the last 5000 years had each touched that stone tablet, the stone would wear away such that there would no longer be anything left to touch, digital data doesn't suffer from the same problem.

Also, touching stone leaves traces that make other archiological work harder. You might be able to find the finger prints of the authors, but they will be faint after 5000 years, you will have no chance of finding them if other people have touched the tablet over the years. (I don't know if we can find fingerprints after that long, but I think you see the danger even if what they are looking for is more subtile)

Re:"expose scholars around the world to...

[JJ]

Most of the plundered texts wind up in private or semi-private collections. At the Oriental Institute, there was a major effort to convince people who held them to permit photographing and documentation. Since this normally involved an evaluation and a translation by an expert and had no strings attached, these plundered texts at least remained available to scholarly analysis.

longevity of tablets vs digital data

[donutz]

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...

This is what

[Haiku 4 U]

The thieves steal from you and me Archive everything

Digital obsolescence

[linux slacker]

The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets.

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...

Hmmm...and quite affordable, too.

[gnomer]

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.

Archive Some Shonen Knife!

[egg troll]

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

Often digital dosen't last.

[sanermind]

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.