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Science

5000 year-old Cuneiform tablets Go Digital 151

Posted by Hemos from the preserve-the-past dept.
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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5000 year-old Cuneiform tablets Go Digital More

5000 year-old Cuneiform tablets Go Digital

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  • To make them last longer (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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)
  • Anyone for antiquated dominoes?

  • Cuneiform is... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Friday May 17, 2002 @03:20PM (#3539175) Homepage Journal
    Cuneiform is awl write!
    • Yeah, I'd have to agree. Writing these days has absolutely no stylus. The clayperson has no hope of competing with the assyrious scholar, unless he or she buys one of those tablet-ure books.

      (sue me, it's Friday! ;)
  • Domain Name Expiration Notice

    Reply by: May 17, 3000BC
    Renewal Rate: ### annually per domain name

    Instructions:
    1) Complete the attached form.....

    I guess Verisign has been at it a long time.

    -Ed
  • rapidly plundered historical texts"

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but if they've already been plundered, isn't it too late?

  • Unlikely (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LISNews ( 150412 ) on Friday May 17, 2002 @03:22PM (#3539200) Homepage
    "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.
    • I really don't see how looking at a picture of an ancient text is worse than looking at the ancient text itself. You are looking at text, the meat is in the words not in the medium.

      • 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.

        • "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."

          Kinda like p2p filesharing... Hope the last piece of Gilgamesh doesn't take as long to get hold of as most things do. (We've already been waiting a long time to complete it).

          "Also, cuneiform writers tended not to care much about rules of typography"

          Kinda like /. users.

          "...so they considered it no big deal if long sentences wrapped around the edges of a tablet."

          Haha! You see! Those ancestors of Klerk's had no chance with their tablet-widening posts back then!

          graspee

    • Just remember the Digitized Domesday Book [slashdot.org]. The digital version is now pretty much worthless after 15 years, but the original paper one is doing fine. And last I checked, stone can last quite a while.
    • 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? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bluGill ( 862 )

      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)

      • Yep, good point, I'm certainly not advocating for that. Mine was more of a comment that seeing (and touching if possble) something in person is much better in person. Not always, and most things would just get destroyed if eveyrone could touch it and use it, but it's always good to see the real thing, alot of people seem to be forgetting that.
      • You can touch digital models. See Reachin [reachin.se] and SensAble [sensable.com].
      • "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)"

        FYI I have a Sumerian Clay tablet which has a very prominent and clear thumbprint on it. If I ever rip off some diamond or something I'm going to leave copies of this thumbprint all over the place to confuse people...

        graspee

        • But seriously - what is the point of knowing that there's a thumbprint on a clay tablet? Unless it's stolen and has the thief's fingerprint on there's no way you'd find out which person's fingerprint it was. My history teacher used to say that historians will have a hard time finding out things about the 20th century because in a century or so the magnetic media, CDs, videos etc will have degraded to such an extent as to be unreadable - whether it's true or not I don't know but I suspect it is for the magnetic media at least.
          • Dude, it's just the thought of it: that 5000 years ago some other conscious human being held that clay tablet the same way I'm holding it now.

            It is perhaps irrational that human beings feel a sense of awe when faced with large time scales, and also that the awe is increased by physical contact.

            If you can't understand it then you should watch that scene in Star Trek: First Contact where Picard is feeling the rocket...

            graspee

    • 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.

      Well, if you're teaching a class, or translating the tablets, or doing some other such research, your goal is to learn something or teach something to someone else, not to have some kind of enlightening experience.
    • 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.

      Well considering if I ever actually went to go see it I would be looking at it through a glass case (at best), at least this way I can get as close as I want to them, whenever I want.
    • The real danger with losing the original medium is that of losing what WASN'T visible and obvious. For example, many original parchments are being digitized, and for preservation of the visible information that's perfectly fine. However, closer examination of those parchments has at times revealed hidden information that only becomes visible with special equipment (X rays, UV etc), such as previous texts that had been bleached off to reuse the parchment. That sort of hidden information is forever lost when the originals are gone. In the case of stones or clay tablets, maybe the potential for such information is lesser, but then again, you never know.
    • Most people have trouble understanding that.

      My favorite saying in that vein :

      "The Map is not the territory"

    • being able to touch something that was written 4,000 years ago is a much different experience.

      That's true. Just the other day I picked up a rock, and man that thing was the most amazing experience. Just imagine how long that rock had been sitting there, or where it came from. Its probably much older than 4000 years, but it made me feel good knowing I got to have my time with it.
    • You do have a good point, but I suspect that a virtual representation of clay tablets is going to be closer to the real thing than a "virtual representation" of the grand canyon, at least for most intents & porposes (wouldn't you agree?)

    • 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.



  • 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.
  • ... 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

  • longevity of tablets vs digital data (Score:3, Insightful)

    by donutz ( 195717 ) on Friday May 17, 2002 @03:26PM (#3539233) Homepage Journal
    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...

    • 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.

      I wonder if this is really true. Sure, those tablets last a long time in the ground, but can they survive one good earthquake in California? Petrified dinosaur bones last millions of years in the ground, but they've been known to get damaged and destroyed, even once they're in a museum.
    • 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.
    • 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...

      So instead of Napster, we'll have Tabletster?
  • 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 [slashdot.org] someone tried to preserve something digitally...

  • This is what (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Haiku 4 U ( 580059 )
    The thieves [detnews.com] steal [salon.com] from you and me
    Archive everything
    • It's sad that libraries don't have the funding to pay for staff or tech to keep tabs on all these books/ tablets/ ect.

      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.

  • 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...

    • Re:Digital obsolescence (Score:3, Informative)

      by uradu ( 10768 )
      > 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.
      • 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

        Sure, the effort is trivial is someone/some people take the time to update the format to a more modern one from time to time (as you proposed). What happens when they don't, and the necessary hardware for data-extraction becomes antiquated, no longer works (because replacement hardware is non-existent), or simply doesn't exist?

        I refer you to an article on Slashdot dealing with the area of computer forensics [slashdot.org], and how bloody expensive it can be when trying to recover data from obsolete formats.

        • > What happens when they don't, and the necessary hardware for data-extraction becomes antiquated

          Yes, if you skip several generations of media technology, the data transfer will become increasingly more difficult and expensive. As would probably be the case for punched cards today. But even then, if you have a large and/or valuable enough information store, the cost of building a one-off custom reader would usually be orders of magnitude less than re-digitizing from scratch.

          Besides, what we're talking about here is not someone's personal archive of Slashdot articles saved to 3" floppies (remember those?), which definitely would not be worth the effort to recover. We're talking about one of the top museums and one of the largest universities in the world, which together certainly have the interest, motivation and means to periodically update and backup one of their main products.

          My point is, if you save your resume onto a CD-R and dig it into the backyard in a time capsule, chances are that in 50 years you won't be able to recover it. But if the information is valuable enough to you, the effort to periodically migrate it onto emerging media is quite minimal.
          • Come on people., punched tape and cards really aren't a big problem. Lots of the hardware still exists and will be in museums for decades, if not centuries. Manuals giving encodings of many formats, real chewed-tree books, still exist and will do for a long time.

            Even so, compared with the effort required to decode cuneiform from first principles, reading punch cards without either hardware or manuals would be a doddle --- always assuming that the cards still exist.

            Exactly the same argument can be made for CDs, 9-track tape and so forth. As long as the written media exists and someone is sufficiently interested, it can very probably be read. The oft-quoted "unreadability" of the digital Domesday book is a misconception. It can be read; no-one is sufficiently interested to put the effort into reading it.

            Paul
      • No monks and centuries of transcription required there.

        I just got this picture of monks in brown robes sorting through punch cards. :)

  • I don't think this is what MS had in mind... (Score:4, Funny)

    by mblase ( 200735 ) on Friday May 17, 2002 @03:34PM (#3539304)
    ...when they gave the university a grant to develop a new sort of web tablet.

  • Hmmm...and quite affordable, too. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gnomer ( 179654 ) on Friday May 17, 2002 @03:34PM (#3539308)
    Tablets even show up on Web auction site eBay, where bidding can start at $1.

    Those cuneiform tablets [ebay.com] 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.

    • 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.

      Just because something is old, doesn't make it valuable or rare. Should I feel guilty if I buy some 2000-year-old Roman coin for $10?

      The world is not running out of cuneiform tablets of some merchant's accounting records.

  • PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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...

  • excerpts (Score:3, Funny)

    by dingleberrie ( 545813 ) on Friday May 17, 2002 @03:37PM (#3539331)
    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) [disney.com] - 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.

  • Uh oh... (Score:4, Funny)

    by No Such Agency ( 136681 ) <abmackay AT gmail DOT com> on Friday May 17, 2002 @03:42PM (#3539379)
    "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 [slashdot.org] was going to happen sooner or later'."

    • Re:Uh oh... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RevRigel ( 90335 )
      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.
  • Larry Wall did Perl already in the 80s.
  • Take two of these and call me next millenia.

    Sorry, had to do it.

    Tcd004

  • Often digital dosen't last. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sanermind ( 512885 ) on Friday May 17, 2002 @03:58PM (#3539516)
    Note this link [ananova.com] 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.
    • Right, fine, the digital copies won't last. That's not the bloody point though. If researchers can just download an image of the tablet they don't have to come in contact with the original and perhaps it will help to preserve them that much longer.

      Get yer grubby hands off my tablets!

    • One way to get around problems with reading digital information is to make your archives analog.

      The Long Now Foundation is using analog technology for their Rosetta Disk [rosettaproject.org] project. This project aims to make a permanent archive of the worlds languages.

      This technology [norsam.com] is by far the best way to create permenant archives that will be impervious to all the problems associated with digital data.

    • Hehe, Mickey Mouse doomed to the ashcan of history, as if he had never existed.
  • 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 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.

  • Ancient Sumerian Proverbs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Ranger ( 1783 )
    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!
  • 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.
    • Except that errors in the ditization can result in the acedemics operating on mis-transmogrified information. When you work on the original, you know you're not making assumptions or working on problems that may in fact not exist in the original and simply be artifacts of the digital conversion.

      A minor quibble, but lets not underestimate the importance of having a cannonical reference copy whom everyone knows and agrees represents The Truth.

      Now, if you're just talking about these copies as 'working copies', fine. It just scares me that we digitize the original, lock the original up for decades, and be operating on a dataset that may potentially have errors, or use a low enough 'technology of today' resolution in the data that may result in intricate details of the original going unnoticed for an unneccessarily long time.

      Good post tho, I certainly conceed that this is a good idea for 'working copies' for scientits, acedemics to work off of - just so long as they dont forget that there is a reference copy available and that they should check it when something smells funny on the working copy.
      • Errors in the digitization because modern technology doesn't have high enough resolution? Have you been to the site? These are clay tablets written with fingers and sticks - you could take the photos with a playskool digital camera through a steel grate in low light conditions and still be able to read them fine - I don't think resolution and quality will cause any problems...

        I definitely agree that reference copies need to be kept.
  • 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! [stereolithography.com]

    Bet this stuff lasts as long as the clay...

    -Jhon
  • I've seen a lot of comments discussing the value of digitizing the tables and which format will last longer - the digitized version or the tablet itself. Regardless of which actually lasts longer is the fact that by digitizing these tables, people like you and me have access to what would be an otherwise difficult subject to study.

    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 [bookofkells.ie] 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.

  • Wow, interesting to browse (Score:4, Funny)

    by mrroot ( 543673 ) on Friday May 17, 2002 @04:38PM (#3539761)
    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

  • No mention of Perseus? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tibbetts ( 7769 )

    Most folks have never heard of it, but the Perseus Project [tufts.edu] 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.)

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

    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 [promo.net] 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!"

  • DMCA Violation (Score:2, Funny)

    by MarkLR ( 236125 )
    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.
  • 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.
  • If I can learn to read these, I'll be cunilingual, right?
  • Seems like every few years, somebody has to trot out the tablet-based computing idea. =)
  • (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

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