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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.
Cuneiform is awl write!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"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.
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.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
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...
...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.
Tablet 12843 begins: "MAKE MONEY FAST"
Tablet 34935 has:
>>>> me too!
>>>
>>> me too!
>> Me Too
>
> ME TOO
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I think that four fifths of the tablets are actually "Cuneispam".
"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!"
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.
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the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
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
> what are the odds that in 4 millenia we'll still have the digital versions in a readable format?
The odds of still having readable punched cards are practically zero. However, this is a tired argument that is repeated far too often. The difference between punched cards and clay tablets is that one medium is (easily) machine readable, while the other isn't. Once information is present in machine readable form, its transfer between various media is something that can be highly automated and done in a reasonable amount of time. No monks and centuries of transcription required there.
Even in the case of punched cards, the information can be transfered onto more modern media (e.g. hard drives) in a very reasonable amount of time with a very reasonable amount of effort. With newer media, the effort becomes even more trivial. Once you have the entire Library of Congress on hard drives, the process of transferring their contents to (fewer and fewer) drives (or whatever new technology arrives) every ten years or so can easily become a routine process. You'd like a copy of the LOC? Sure, just pop your holographic crystal into the slot and hit Go.