Turn dumb tweets into cuneiform tablets
dumbcuneiform.com
dumbcuneiform.com
Not quite true. Cuneiform is many writing systems, all of which are written using the same method. They do specify here that they’re using Old Persian — a sensible choice in my opinion, given that the sound–spelling correspondence is quite regular.
"Irving Finkel teaches how to write cuneiform I Curator's Corner Season 4 Episode 8 #CuratorsCorner"
Who is he:
> Irving Leonard Finkel is a British philologist and Assyriologist. He is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia.
It's short enough for an introduction, funny and entertaining, and broad enough, with some sprinkling of information that gives an idea of the complexities of the language too, not just the cuneiform itself. An Assyrian name like "Ashurbanipal" is really complex, apparently, with three parts, one part written in Sumerian but not using their word and pronunciation and ignoring that one could have written it using syllables from Assyrian... it's quite messy. That can be ignored for the purpose behind the submitted website, but I think anyone who wants to know a bit more about cuneiform probably wants it to be in the context of when and how that writing system was used, together with the language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I
I'm sure he has many other even better videos, but I will have to yet get to them.
It is critical that you listen to him reading them, because he has a certain infectious enthusiasm for what he is saying.
They say: sufferings are misfortunes," said Pierre. 'But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God's sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us.“
I will carry it with me on my camino if it gets here in time.
I’m fine with that to be honest. I love stuff like this, and it’s perfect because I need a stone for my pilgrimage.
I had to laugh big time when I learned about the sheer amount of dick graffiti and explicit scenes in ancient caves or buildings, and how historians have attempted to purge all naughtiness from the records.
(You could argue that TCP/IP's "handshake" is a ritual; each part has meaning)
And some rituals are societal; like washing hands before a meal. Those can last even beyond it being as necessary as it once was.
From the British Museum: Irving Finkel teaches how to write cuneiform https://youtu.be/XVmsfL5LG90
There are many other videos by him, but that's a place to start.
Would be historically congruent if we leave behind equally trivial artefacts.
It's probably a complaint about the quality of the wheat.
Circa 1650 BC, in Mesopotamia, there was a fairly large city for the times, Sippar. Probably Sumerian originally, then Babylonian culturally. Pesky barbarians on horseback came and razed parts of the city. It was not abandoned entirely and remained important until the fall of Babylon another millennia later. But the archaeological situation was ideal; many homes had been abandoned quickly and never re-occupied.
The majority of abandoned houses from that event, have at least some paperwork in the form of property deeds and sales receipts. Some houses were absolutely stuffed with archives of paperwork (claywork?), large rooms full of boxes, particularly in the homes of merchants and traders and the like. The biggest find, of a prominent man, an important religious functionary, and also expedition trader, was some 2500 tablets in his house.
It provides one of the few cases where we can point to a room, and know the name of a person who lived or worked in that room in ancient times. Though it still maybe doesn't tell us very much about him:
> Perhaps paradoxically, although Ur-Utu’s rich and well-documented archive provides unique insights in social and economic life during the second half of the Old Babylonian period, it does not provide us with much direct information about Ur-Utu as a person. The archive contains contracts and administrative texts documenting his economic activities and those of his family, but this does not tell us much about him. The more than 200 letters in the same archive look more promising at first sight, but these were almost all sent to him by other people, and there are only a few copies of letters he sent; as they mostly concern economic matters, or allude to situations we do not otherwise know about, the letters are also of little help to us.
> [...] A small group of sixty-three tablets from this special box were brought by Inana- mansum from Sippar-Yahrurum, from his father’s archive, to Sippar-Amnanum, to his first house. Quite surprisingly, these documents never mention Inana-mansum’s name, they do not relate to any property he inherited, and most of them—if not all—were many years out of date. What then could have prompted him to take precisely these documents? The oldest document in the box is a tablet dated to Hammurabi 3 (1790) concerning silver to be returned to two members of the family, four generations before Inana-mansum (Di 1911). It is the oldest tablet of the archive mentioning members of the family. This tablet must have entered the archive at the time it was written. For the last of the archive’s owners, Ur-Utu, this tablet went back five generations. Each generation had carefully kept and transmitted this document which in the meantime had become economically useless. When the archive was brutally terminated by fire in Aṣ 18 it still contained this tablet, which by then had reached the venerable age of 161.
Congruence indeed. I also have such a box.
(Excerpts from "Learned, Rich, and Unhappy: Ur-Utu of Sippar", Chapter 13 The Oxford handbook of cuneiform culture, 2011)
Also, saying that Old Person had ‘three vowels’ while Sanskrit had ‘sixteen vowels’ is comparing apples to oranges a little bit. It seems like Old Persian had three basic vowel qualities, each of which could be short or long; meanwhile, Sanskrit had five basic vowel qualities, each of which could be short or long, as well as syllabic consonants /ṛ ḷ/ which could also be short or long, as well as /ṃ ḥ/ after vowels. It’s bigger, to be sure, but Sanskrit only two more basic vowel qualities than Old Persian (or four if you count the syllabic consonants).
The only thing our society leaves, that can be found in a way similar to how we’ve dug out the old civilisations, is frankly nuclear waste. It’s about the only thing that isn’t processed in some way and mass stored along with other processed garbage. Maybe that’s a little more depressing than your cute little anecdote, but at least you can take comfort in the fact that if we don’t do something about our impact on climate change then nobody will be around to dig through our garbage in thousand of years. In part because people bought and sold silly useless stuff like this and shipped it around the globe.
Ok, maybe it’s time for my morning coffee.
And the chance it is discovered and wondered about goes up significantly if climate change wipes out 99% of human population and society; because archeological digs are only interesting when it's a previous "mysterious" society; otherwise we just have historical preservation.
Middens[1] are pretty good archeological sources, though.
That said, we'll probably end up mining and reprocessing landfills into raw materials before too long.
And, of course, in the tradition of bad tattoos, none of us were never completely sure whether the "spelling" or transliteration or pronunciation was completely accurate or even close. We just reveled in the exotic, personalized objets d'art, regardless of their authenticity (although the vendor did appear to be some sort of Arab who might even be authentically Egyptian himself.)
I would personally like to see some language scholars add obscure languages to Google Translate so they could be converted back and forth. Or perhaps make a browser addon like the former LeetKey addon [2] not available for the browser any more which can be useful to battle censorship.
[1] - https://funtranslations.com/babylonian
[2] - https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/firefox/addon/leet-key/
So write it ASCII or UTF8 :)
There are thousands of tablets that need to be translated still, so this would be really useful as a starting point
Just now I learned that standard is to take photos with lighting from the top left corner to be able to read these [2], that said reading physical clay tablets is a bit harder than just reading a paper. I have often been surprised that 3D objects are so hard to interpret correctly from just photos.
[1] https://github.com/oi-deepscribe/deepscribe [2] https://youtu.be/dwGmyy2Aabg?t=690