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Ancient Books Go Online
jd writes "The BBC is reporting that the United Nations' World Digital Library has gone online with an initial offering of 1,200 ancient manuscripts, parchments and documents. To no great surprise, Europe comes in first with 380 items. South America comes in second with 320, with a very distant third place being given to the Middle East at a paltry 157 texts. This is only the initial round, so the leader board can be expected to change. There are, for example, a lot of Sumerian and Babylonian tablets, many of which are already online elsewhere. Astonishingly, the collection is covered by numerous copyright laws, according to the legal page. Use of material from a given country is subject to whatever restrictions that country places, in addition to any local and international copyright laws. With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered. There is nothing on whether the original artists get royalties, however."
Copyright seems to have an indefinite life these days...
With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered.
Is anyone surprised at this? Seriously, does copyright ever end these days?
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
Surprisingly, as time goes by, the amount of ancient material available INCREASES every year. Old texts that are found and discovered are digitized and released to the world, rather than being lost in obscurity, readable by a small handful until the ultimate demise of the original work.
I see this every day.
For example, years back, when I was in High School, I was a big fan of "alternative" music. Bands like Depeche Mode, Erasure, Bauhaus, and others were my meat and potatoes, but being raised in small-town, USA, I had to work like the pretty hard to find stuff to listen to. My specialty was rare concert mixes and exploratory remixes - in many cases, I resigned to dubbing cassettes in order to get my fix.
Today, it's much easier for me to find rare, concert remixes! Many (most?) are available in mere seconds a la YouTube, as well as MP3s by LimeWire! And it seems that with each year, more and more and more obscure stuff is available - from Jerry Lee Lewis concerts to Arlo Guthrie live to early stage mixes of Yaz (then "Yazoo") ...
Why is this so?
Take a look at the Long Tail Economics principle made possible by the network effect of the Internet. This is one of the most insightful articles that exists on the Internet!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Gravestone uncovered by excavations for the new Pan-Continental Bicycle Suspension Bridge Project...
"Here Lies Alfred E. Neuman
Mad as Hell...
Born 1954, Died 2337
Copyright, 1954"
The bit about copyright on the "legal" page is just boilerplate. All it means is that the presentation of a document on this site doesn't necessarily make it public domain or grant some other license, that the owners of the original document retain whatever rights they have. The copyright laws of individual countries are only valid within that country - you only need to concern yourself with your own country's laws. There are indeed a lot of problems with excessive copyright in the world, but the copyright concerns in the post are much ado about nothing.
To the people tagging this !tech:
The success of technology is intimately tied to the free flow of information. Issues like there are important, because poorly designed restrictions inhibit our ability to make technological progress without spending a huge amount of resources on needless legal bickering.
If 8000-year-old documents are being withheld from the public domain there's a problem. A problem affecting both the richness of our culture and our ability to do science and apply it in the technology sector.
.: Max Romantschuk
Wait, what racist overtone? Just about anyone who's actually on the lookout for older manuscripts knows that there's not a lot of middle eastern content available. It's just a fact. An unfortunate one, to be sure, for historians, but there's no racism. You're being oversensitive.
Europe, on the other hand, has a great deal of published archaeological research. For example, if I want to research medieval knives, I can find a wealth of information on English artifacts. When I tried to find references on Armenian specimens, the only thing I could find was a 3-volume Russian dig report. The situation is endlessly frustrating.
--Somebody infect me with a
The submitter hopefully says "to no great surprise" as a common way of acknowledging the occidentalizing tendencies of western academic and political traditions, of which the United Nations by virtue of its failed father the League of Nations clearly is. That whole colonization/empire thing that Europe was doing... before America got in the game with Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Philippines, and so on, led to a perspective not of understanding through observation and interaction of the inherent value anything humans do but instead produced a mindset that compared the conquering "civilized, rational" peoples to those "uncivilized barbarians" they have occupied.
... consider the title of some college art classes: basic "Art History I+II" that covers egypt, greece, rome, europe after the renaissance, and america after the armory show. Anything else that happened anywhere else at any point in history doesn't matter and gets put in the category "Non-western art."
But the point whenever someone brings up Edward Said is that up until a generation or two ago any study in any field that even bothered to examine cultures external to their own did so in what amounts to "Our values versus their inability to yet reach a level of sophistication that matches our values"
Perhaps another art example: Many are well aware of simple cave paintings in France. Impressive, yes, but works of deeper magnitude and greater age in South Africa are ignored; similarly, pre-Egyptian Saharan peoples left numerous rock-carvings that predate formal Egyptian art yet they are ignored.
Edward Said's ideas are often cited in the study of religion as it can be difficult for outsiders to truly grasp the object of study in the same way that a practitioner might. The early pioneers in the study of religion just over a century ago were the first to grasp religion could be an object of study but all too clearly display in their writings the bias of a true believer who writes about these curious savages with their peculiar practices that just don't make sense at all when compared with Protestant Christianity.
I digress.
ma'a es salaama.
You are correct. There's no shortage of Middle Eastern material already on the Internet ETCSL, Library of Congress, CDLI all have collections of cuneiform documents from Sumeria, Akkadia and Babylonia. It would have been child's play to collect all of that and add it to the collection.
They might well do so, in future. The standings in the league table are merely the starting point. But, yes, because of who is doing the starting, it IS no surprise that American and British researchers would concentrate on texts closer to home, particularly as there's going to be a national incentive to prioritize home-grown stuff above museum pieces. Especially if *cough* some of the museums would rather not remind people of what they have.
On the other hand, Middle Eastern countries don't have quite the same fascination with massively ancient cultures, many simply don't have the money or the resources (Iraq being a good example), and even when they DO have these, more than a few of the really early writings from the region are, ummm, elsewhere.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Sankrt texts that are written on banana leaves in India need to be oiled to prevent them breaking down. Part of the the deal for the caste system was that the Brahmans had to upkeep the texts, unfortunately now they are in a modern society and these text are being lost to decay. The yoga karuna (the instructions of astanga yoga) was "eaten by the ants" according to S.K Patabi Jois.
Hmm, perhaps GP is overly sensitive but the tone of the summary does seem strange. I am all against holding back the truth for fear of offending someone's racial or (especially) religious sensitivities but I am not in favor of underhanded insults either.
Saying that it is "no surprise" that Europe comes first and Middle East comes last with a "paltry" number of manuscripts is completely unnecessary in this context and can easily be read as insulting to people in Middle East, with racism not far below the surface.
After all, East Asia has 81, Africa 122, North America 133 etc. why single out Middle East with 157, with words like "no surprise" and "paltry"?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I hear Gozer was very big in Sumeria. Hopefully there's something in these texts to suggest what he's doing in my icebox.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
There is a Swedish company that has done this in Sweden. Their user side technology is based on a really horrible Flash interface, but most public collections of rare manuscripts are available online. I talked with one of their representatives about a year ago and, if I don't remember incorrect, there were about 900 manuscripts already published at different Swedish museum sites and even more in the process of being photographed.
Sweden pillaged Northern and Middle Europe for more then a thousand year (and those parts of Europe pillaged southern Europe and their pillage ended up as our pillage), no other nation ever got much of a chance to pillage Sweden and now our museums have a lot more European manuscripts then the rest of Europe all together, from about any culture that has been writing things down in Europe. The selection is kind of random as the Swedish armies/vikings/pirates preferred books with a lot of gold and jewels (usually removed when the books reached Sweden) or parchment books that could be made into blank books to be used for military book keeping and didn't look much at the actual content. Although there where sometimes standing orders from Swedish scholars what to take and from the Thirty Years' War and forward there where always a large group of scholar expert pillagers accompanying the Swedish army.