ListNook

NumberOneInTheHood 12 hr ago +71

Everyone just loved to b**** about copper

71

30yearCurse 11 hr ago +22

Well... I was cheated. Ea-nasir I later found out mixed with copper with LEAD... That shabarra.

22

Even_Trifle9341 6 hr ago +3

Customer from hell resorts to slander because they don’t understand they bought the wrong thing.

3

appleparkfive 9 hr ago +8

The original Amazon reviews. Ea-nasir would have some choice words about some of those sellers.

8

Ice_Milk 10 hr ago +74

Love this kind of project. Digitizing and translating these tablets means we’re finally hearing everyday voices from 4,000 years ago, not just kings and warriors. Even if AI only does a rough first pass, it massively speeds things up and helps spot patterns humans might miss. More of this, please. Turning old clay into new knowledge is exactly what we should be doing.

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thetalentedmzripley 8 hr ago +19

This is an appropriate use for ai! I don’t mind it helping make translations easier/cutting down translation times for researchers, but it can f*** straight off taking actual jobs.

19

No_Economist3788 7 hr ago +13

i mean, it's someone's job to do those translations currently...

13

D4DWGN 3 hr ago +1

à lot of cultural heritage work just goes undone due to funding issues.

1

dumbnaturedude 10 hr ago +24

First excel spread shit! Some poor secretary with her chisel and hammer!!

24

fruitybix 8 hr ago +18

They pressed the markings into soft clay, everyday accounting does not have time for hammers and chisels. Most of our best surviving tablets got cooked in fires then buried, firing them like pottery.

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Dannyz 6 hr ago +3

You know paper spreadsheets were common before computers right?

3

30yearCurse 12 hr ago +48

I am glad they are digitizing, translating the cuneiform tablets and making them available. It seems that AI could do a first pass, then that could be checked by the few actual readers. AI could also find commonalities between them and hopefully help sitch together a better view of history. It would be awesome if Gilgamesh was an actual person and may be one of those spells could held today.

48

xoXImmortalXox 11 hr ago +51

Modern Assyrian here 👋 Shlama Very cool read... The Assyrians were some of the first peoples converted to Christianity... and you can find similarities between the epic of Gilgamesh and Noah's Ark... I tell my daughter, we have been great story tellers for over 5000 years.

51

danmingothemandingo 9 hr ago +11

It blew my mind reading the epic of gilgamesh the level of civilisation and culture that must have existed in 2000-3000 B.C. before reading it I would have stupidly imagined cavemen grunting ug and og at each other

11

VannaTLC 8 hr ago +3

All that has meaningfully.changed in human socialisation in ~40 thousand years is technology. Now, that cna change a lot, but even then, the biggest changes are in the last 500 years and the most impactful are in living memory.

3

30yearCurse 10 hr ago +4

I think your right, and much longer. You cannot go out into the night sky and start making stories up, even now you the cave paintings were story telling. When your children were asking you about stuff perhaps you told them of the monster in the cave as your drove by... and the fairies that take care of the flowers.

4

rudolf_waldheim 6 hr ago +1

Isn't the equivalent to Noah Ut-Napishti?

1

DPitoLeMans 10 hr ago +12

I studied both Akkadian and Hittite in college and cuneiform tablets are extremely difficult to read even if you're trained to read them. They are normally extremely small, since they had to fit into the palm of a hand to write, the text is cramped with no spacing between letters, the tablets can be in poor condition with text missing, you also have to figure out which language is written since several languages used cuneiform, there are hundreds of signs and there use isn't consistent, signs changed throughout the centuries and different cultures using cuneiform. This isn't even a full list of the difficulties. I would transcribe and translate known tablets as homework and it would take days to do three short sentences, I had sign list that I would use to narrow down the possible signs and then use a dictionary and try different possible combinations to find one that made sense in context. Translating these tablets is extremely time-consuming even if you're good at it. Using AI isn't the worst idea we do have a decent corpus to train them on but probably not enough human readers to fact check the AI.

12

xX609s-hartXx 11 hr ago +19

Dude, I've seen them trying to use AI on medieval latin texts. It couldn't even handle those and the company used the picture full of obvious errors as their ad...

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30yearCurse 10 hr ago +6

They thought they would never read the burned scrolls in Herculaneum but slowly are making progress.

6

Enyss 4 hr ago +1

How long ago? Because AI is progressing incredibly fast, and 5 years ago is basically antiquity.

1

motu8pre 11 hr ago +5

Did you just go off about AI being able to decipher these, since we have so much training data for it to use?... Is that last part about spells serious?

5

30yearCurse 11 hr ago +3

I have read there are very few readers of cuniform, 500K tables, with only 10% translated. The spells, well apparently they did not protect the kingdom... so maybe dig through some more tablets and see if there is a better one.. yes /S on the spell.

3

Bong-Hits-For-Jesus 10 hr ago +3

and if gilgamesh was an actual person, then much bigger wtf would be the sumerian kings list where the first rulers supposedly lived and ruled for thousands of years, and as you go down the list of rulers their time dwindles down to more common time frames in the double digits

3

aculady 10 hr ago +16

As people switched from keeping time by days, to months, to years, symbols they used to represent a span didn't necessarily change, even as their understanding of what that symbols represented did. So older sections of a list might be keeping time in days or months rather than years, and it might have been understood by the people who were recording it, but then the institutional knowledge was lost, and it became interpreted as something fantastical.

16

Bong-Hits-For-Jesus 9 hr ago +8

thats a interesting theory of their interpretation of time, but the sumerians invented the measurement of time (sexigesimal) which we still used till this day, and there is no recording of their measurement of time changing throughout their history in any cuneiform tablets

8

Gadgetman_1 6 hr ago +1

We are still losing knowledge because people don't write down 'obvious' things.

1

nullbyte420 6 hr ago +1

But for example in the Bible there's a thing in the oldest texts with there seemingly being about four "months" in a year, or rather seasons. The theory isn't that bad

1

Certain-Schedule-574 12 hr ago +1

I thought the same thing when I read this. This stuff can give so much insight in to the culture and way of thinking. Providing the language is that evolved I suppose. I’d like to learn some ancient witchcraft. 😉

1

protostar71 7 hr ago +6

“Its silence lasted millennia” Rocks arent exactly known to be vocal.

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CumGuzlinGutterSluts 6 hr ago +3

If you throw them in a fire they scream, which is relatable.

3

keystoneux 3 hr ago +1

Complaint letter to the local council?

1

Theflywanderer 6 hr ago

It’s abt wumbo you know wumbology the study of wumbo

0

A 4,000-year-old object stored in Denmark may preserve one of humanity’s earliest written traces of everyday administration, and its silence lasted millennia

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