> Good catch, smarties! Cuneiform is a writing system, not a language (like roman letters). We're transliterating - converting the syllables of your message to the cuneiform script - rather than translating.
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.
There are many similar ones, but I like this one from The British Museum the most, because of the teacher:
"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.
The hell with it, I bought one with this amazing quote on it:
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.
Makes you wonder how many things being explained as „religious rituals“ or „holy sites“ have actually just been something entirely trite, banal, or people messing with each other.
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.
Also makes me wonder how many things which are religious rituals at the same time was trite and banal messaging. Religion was not compartmentalized from the rest of life like it often is now.
The society of HN has a ritual of down playing products that simplify processes for non-developers (the famous dropbox comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224) and claiming that we could build some product in a weekend (Dan Luu's essay summarizes it well https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/). These are worthy of immortalizing in cuneiform for our descendants so they may know our hubris.
There's someone on imgur who's been offering a similar service for fellow imgurites, but I believe they've actually been offering a go at actual translation. (Approximations necessary by the nature of dead languages and the lack of words like "smartphone".)
We probably would. Thinking about writing on paper in the late 20th century, in terms of sheer quantity, it's mostly ordinary paperwork, package labelling, receipts. A random piece of paper from the ordinary home is probably more likely to be a shopping list than a work of literature.
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)
In Old Persian, which is what this site says they use, I’d guess probably 𐎤𐎢𐎳𐎡𐎳𐎡 ⟨ku-u-f-i-f-i⟩, though it depends on how you pronounce it and how you decide to transcribe that pronunciation into a language with only three vowels.
Not really. Three-vowel systems are pretty common: they’re also found in Classical Arabic, Quechua, most Australian and Eskimo–Aleut languages, and a bunch of others.
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).
I know this is a cute anecdote, but will you take yours with you when you get buried? And this is assuming that you live in a place where your gravesite won’t be reused by someone else a few generations later. If not chances are it’ll either get burned by a garbage processing plant or end up in a landfill along with a lot of other fairly easy to identify as temporary fads like yo-yos and fidget spinners.
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.
What is found archeologically is almost "random" out of what is made; things thrown away into a dump are more likely to be "recovered" at some point (if anyone bothers/cares) than things that are just disposed of randomly in the wilderness.
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.
I suspect that in fifty million years, when an intelligent species start researching earth layers', they'll find one thick layer of plastics and concrete. Followed by t layers of ash and dead plant matter.
Back in the mid-90s, I accompanied a girlfriend to a county fair, and there was a guy with a booth there who was selling Egyptian jewelry with all sorts of exotic designs. And his specialty was a custom pendant that he would fashion with your name in hieroglyphics. So this seemed exotic and exciting to us both, as we were so very goth at the time, and so I ordered one for her, and she wore it proudly. In fact, even as I moved on to the next girlfriend after her, I promptly ordered exactly the same type of hieroglyphic pendant from the same vendor for the new girl. The second girl found it so amazing and was personally touched by my gesture that she made it a permanent fixture of her wardrobe. In every photo I saw of her, for decades since we broke up, she was still wearing her hieroglyphic pendant.
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.)
Egyptian hieroglyphs are probably one of the better choices for exotic writing that most people won't be able to correct you on since it is not generally used for any contemporary language. Arabic, Chinese and English are bad choices, someone will eventually let you know.
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.
As I understand since this is phonetically transliterated to a different language (Old Persian) and then converted to cuneiform, it would not be possible to convert e.g. backup security codes with this. It seems from a brief read that it'd a lot more similar to Japanese's Kanji, so unless you just did one of those fake "alphabets" that can be easily googled, you'd be out of luck from a real translation and back.
Since most photos of cuneiform will be professionally taken it's going to be a bit easier. There are terabytes of images, and apparently lots of tagged data to be used [1] so not an impossible project.
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.
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://youtu.be/XVmsfL5LG90
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden
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