New imaging techniques are making the job of working with such ancient, often damaged texts easier. With highly detailed images, it is possible to pick out marks that may be too obscure to see with a human eye.
Dahl and his colleagues have been digitising tablets and seals stored in collections in Teheran, Paris and Oxford for a project known as the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative.
Without sprawling digital resources like this, training machines to do translation would not even be possible. New imaging techniques, combined with advanced machine vision tools, are helping to transform efforts to decipher ancient languages like Proto-Elamite Credit: British Museum.
Digitisation is also helping researchers to piece together links between texts scattered in collections around the world. Dahl, along with researchers at the University of Southampton and the University of Paris-Nanterre, has digitised 3D images of about 2, stone seals from Mesopotamia. In a pilot project , they then used AI algorithms to examine a group of six tablets and identify matching seal impressions found elsewhere in the world.
The algorithm correctly selected a tablet that is currently stored in Italy , and another that is stored in the United States ; both had been stamped by the same seal. Matching seals and impressions has been notoriously difficult in the past, as many are stored thousands of miles apart. Dahl estimates that all seals could be digitised within about five years, which would then make it possible to trace other patterns.
There is some indication, for example, that certain types of stone were favoured by women. He hopes that as artificial intelligence evolves, it will help us unravel the full potential of the rich information contained in collections around the world.
Imaging is also changing research into undeciphered scripts. Humans tend to be better than machines at this type of decipherment, which typically involves small amounts of text, creative mental leaps, and an understanding of how people lived and organised themselves.
It also involves a great deal of intellectual flexibility. Brown's collection of ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets covers this long span of time and includes both Sumerian and Akkadian examples, both of which were written in cuneiform script. The Sumerians and Akkadians lived harmoniously in the same geographical area, the region between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, but they spoke two dramatically different and unrelated languages.
Sumerian was the language of a people who migrated to southern Mesopotamia in the late 4th millennium BC. To this day, we do not know to which language family it belongs.
Akkadian, on the other hand, is the earliest attested member of the Semitic family of languages. It was written and spoken by both the Assyrians and Babylonians. The writing was invented by the Sumerians and subsequently adapted for Akkadian and other languages, including Elamite in Iran and Hittite in Anatolia.
Both languages were written using a reed or wooden stylus that made impressions of simple shapes on soft clay. To read what was written on letters, legal documents, and literary and scientific texts, knowledge of some cuneiform characters made up out of combinations of wedges and lines was adequate, but there is no way of knowing what percentage of the population possessed this basic literacy. Anything resembling formal education was primarily for the purpose of training scribes, not only to read and write but also to occupy administrative positions in palaces and temples.
Find out more here. Writing is generally agreed to be among the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest invention, since it made history possible. It seems to have been invented in the late fourth millennium BC in Mesopotamia in the form of wedge-shaped marks pressed into soft clay with a reed stylus: the script known as cuneiform. Very soon afterwards, ancient Egypt developed its own writing: the hieroglyphic script, immortalised in the Rosetta Stone kept in the British Museum, which consists of a single royal edict, dated BC, written in the hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek alphabetic scripts.
But although cuneiform and hieroglyphic can today be read by scholars, many of the early inscriptions remain mysterious. How did scholars first decipher these most ancient of scripts?
Irving Finkel is the curator in charge of cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia, of which the Middle East Department has the largest collection- some , pieces — of any modern museum. This work involves reading and translating all sorts of inscriptions, sometimes working on ancient archives to identify manuscripts that belong together, or even join to one another. Andrew Robinson is the author of more than twenty-five books, issued by leading general and academic publishers.
Wish List. Cuneiform Decoding Activity. A fun way for students to practice writing in cuneiform. They can try to write various words in cunieform as well as decode Thanksgiving jokes. Cuneiform and the Code of Hammurabi Double Worksheet! Word Document File. This is an exciting double-worksheet for your students to complete while studying ancient Mesopotamia.
The first section of the sheet has students write their names in Cuneiform and then a secret message to another friend in class. The friend then has to decode the message. The second part has studen. Ancient History , World History. Homework , Worksheets. Cuneiform and Mesopotamia Code Decipher.
PDF Activity. This fun activity will allow students to crack the code and decode a message about Ancient Mesopotamia. How can I use this product? This allows students to act as social scientists and to understand the role written language has in the development of civilizations. What is included? PDF file contains. Mesopotamian Cuneiform Writing - Thinking like a Historian. Students use investigative, research and observation skills to "help" a professor from Oxford decode a Cuneiform tablet.
Ancient History , Social Studies - History. Activities , Cooperative Learning. Did you students want to know more about Cuneiform? Why not give them a little Cuneiform practice while learning about some of the history.
In this activity students will learn about the history of Cuneiform including how the first symbol for barley evolved.
0コメント