Ancient Academia: the life of a Mesopotamian scholar in the seventh century B.C

[0]: https://cdli.ucla.edu/

[1]: https://github.com/cdli-gh

Transcribing the cuneiform script is difficult. There are hundreds of signs. Transcribing a tablet requires some understanding of the language because a sign can take on many different values (polyphony), some signs are so similar that they can only be differentiated by context, and if you're dealing with a language like Hittite, you need to recognize when a sign should be understood as representing an Akkadian or Sumerian word or grammatical construct as a scribal abbreviation. All this changes from language to language and era to era. Also, how signs are written changes over time. And then, getting into the physical aspects of working with tablets, pretty much all of them have damage. Cuneiform is a 3D script and tablets requires varying the light, which won't be captured from a single photograph. Indeed, line drawings are the standard way of publishing tablets. When photographs are used, many are taken with varying light. Some computational techniques are beginning to be used, but very few tablets are recorded in this way. Many tablets are in fragments spread around the museums of the world—figuring out which fragments go together or which tablets are duplicates of each other (to fill in damage) is the largest part of publishing cuneiform texts.