Cuneiform tables [1] are one of those historical artifacts that I find fascinating. Some fun facts:
- Between 500,000 and 2,000,000 tablets have been found
- Less than 100,000 have been translated
- Cuneiform tablets date back to ~3500 BC
- Roughly 30,000 tablets were recovered from the royal archives at Hattusa (Hittite capital) [2] in central Turkey. This archive and the site probably survived because this ancient city was largely forgotten about until archaeologists discovered it in the 19th century.
- This archive produced the earliest known peace treaty between the Hittites and Egyptians
- These archives contain essentially the personal correspondence between Ramses II and the Hittite king [3]
- Cuneiform tablets have been one of the most important sources of written records from the ancient world [4]
What's the status of ancient Egyptian works? Lots of untranslated maybe-gems floating around? I'm still holding out hope a couple of accidentally-cliffhanger'd stories from Lichtheim's books will have endings discovered for me to read!
[+] [-] cletus|6 years ago|reply
- Between 500,000 and 2,000,000 tablets have been found
- Less than 100,000 have been translated
- Cuneiform tablets date back to ~3500 BC
- Roughly 30,000 tablets were recovered from the royal archives at Hattusa (Hittite capital) [2] in central Turkey. This archive and the site probably survived because this ancient city was largely forgotten about until archaeologists discovered it in the 19th century.
- This archive produced the earliest known peace treaty between the Hittites and Egyptians
- These archives contain essentially the personal correspondence between Ramses II and the Hittite king [3]
- Cuneiform tablets have been one of the most important sources of written records from the ancient world [4]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattusa#Cuneiform_royal_archiv...
[3]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/07-...
[4]: http://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=objects1to10
[+] [-] karatestomp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|6 years ago|reply
Can’t that be addressed with deep learning and crowdsourcing?