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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.
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C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
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!"
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
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
Not to nitpick (well, actually, yes, to nitpick), but the Nam-shub of Enki was the cure for Snow Crash, as it was a 'me' that had originally caused the differentiation of language amongst humans. Snow Crash reverted people to their ancient state, in which they were in a lower state of consciousness and communicated using 'intrinsic' human language. Enki created the Nam-shub to allow humanity to grow.