Assyrian Women of Letters | Hacker News Reader

Assyrian Women of Letters

archaeology.org

110 pointsbenbreen23 comments

The cuneiform tablets are written in Assyrian (Akkadian, East Semitic):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Dialects

They also contain some loanwords from the local language of Kanesh (Kaneš, Kültepe 'ash hill' in Turkish), which is the earliest record of any Indo-European language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCltepe

If you'd like to learn to read that language, Hittite is fairly well-understood. And there's a college-freshman-level grammar out since 2011.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/elements-of-hittite/6FC...

The Kanisite Hittite that the GP describes isn't the Hittite taught in textbooks. It is a handful of Indo-European names in otherwise non-Indo-European text. For specialists only.

I am aware. But the fragments of Hittite attested in these Old Babylonian texts predate the earliest bits of the extant Hittite corpus by about a century. Given what we know about how the Hittite language evolved when it is well-attested, the differences are unlikely to be substantial.

My point remains: If you want to study the earliest attested Indo-European language, there's a good freshman-level grammar out there.

FYI: There’s an open Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative that aims to catalogue tablets held around the world:

https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/

For example: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/273210

Presumably these people with access to a pretty decent postal system were the middle or upper classes or the time?

Well, the first example:

> But they resented the fact that after her marriage, she hadn’t done more to help their family business of exporting textiles to Anatolia.

Heir to an international textile import/export business sounds pretty upper class, yeah.

Incredible article, thank you for sharing!

OCR for cuneiform? Maybe the tablets are too difficult.

Even if you can digitally recognize all the individual wedge-marks, it's a a multi-language multi-cultural thing with a couple thousand years of usage.

In other words, that might not be the bottleneck.

Publishing a tablet is much more than identifying the characters. There's often a step of "join", a kind of 3D puzzle where you try to join fragments of a broken tablet. And of course you have to provide the archaeological context. I heard several French assyriologists describe this whole work as long and tedious, especially for artefacts that were extracted long ago and have less context.

As far as I know, OCR for handwritten texts on paper gives poor results. A cuneiform text on a tablet is much harder: the surface is not flat, the visibility of marks is highly dependent on the lightning, cracks often alter the characters... For instance, when the writer misjudged the length of its text, he can write on the sides of the tablet, or the back side, usually more convex. Even producing a good series of photos of a tablet is hard work.

Meta: The web site has the full article in one page, but it's split into 6 parts with clicks and scrolls up/down required. Why do people try hard to break simple things? Fortunately, the "Reader View" in my browser provided a merged view so that I could read normally, without patching the HTML with DevTools.

I agree OCR for handwriting is difficult.

A few years ago I obtained some scans of records from WWI for my grandfather's unit on the Western Front. All the reports were written in English, but using elaborate 'copperplate' script, which I imagine is very difficult for automatic OCR - it was difficult for me to read as a native English speaker and reader - imagine writing like that in some wet shell-straddled trench.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperplate_script

Once tablets are reconstructed, perhaps releasing some kind of 3D scans (raw laser and meshes) for an open competition, with decent prize could be productive (like the prize for the Herculaneum scrolls in the news this week).

The situation is even worse for cuneiform. With English, you're looking at approximately 70 glyphs including upper case, lower case, digits, and punctuation. Cuneiform throws you into the hundreds of glyphs. And their forms change over time, often drastically.

For 3D scanning, Reflectance Transformation Imaging is pretty cheap, easy, and popular for imaging tablets.

Have you tried GPT-V? I often throw it crazy stuff like medieval handwriting and it seems to do a pretty good job of reading and translating it.

This feels like an area where synthetic data can help a lot. It should be fairly "easy" to generate cuneiform-like characters, render them on procedurally generated clay tablets, break tablets using a physics engine and render the pieces in different angles. Training a model on recognizing puzzle pieces with this data would be pretty feasible too.

weird question - I remember hearing that pre-writing societies have 'memory objects' that use a series of symbols to help prompt memorization of an epic poem or the like when held in one's hands. Might cuneiform been intended to be 'read' more like braille, by touch?

> “The men in this society were not expected to express emotion,” Barjamovic says. “They occasionally do, and they’re admonished for it. Women could show a little more emotion.”

Oh, my, why is this still true in many societies today? Is this deep deep flaw endemic to humanity across cultural lines?

Are millennials/ Gen Z the first generation where men anre (perhaps?) allowed to be almost as emotional as women?

One sad adjacent fact about millennials and Gen Z is that the men who do decide to be emotional sometimes tend to be ignored (or despised) by women, and thus (unfortunately) turned into involuntarily celibate men.

It's seemed to me that there was a real turn in western society at some point in the last decades. Our family has been watching Star Trek TOS and one thing that's really stood out is how open Kirk, Spock, and Bones can be about their feelings. In the first episode Bones is talking casually to Kirk about his feelings for an old flame, how he still misses her and wonders if he made a mistake. It was almost startling.

Of course where all that got us was the origin of 'slash' fiction. Men speaking affectionally to each other has gotten popularly reclassified as a coverup for deeper feelings. I think that explains a lot about where we are now.

> men who do decide to be emotional sometimes tend to be ignored (or despised) by women

And other men. No need to make this a gender war.

> One sad adjacent fact about millennials and Gen Z is that the men who do decide to be emotional sometimes tend to be ignored (or despised) by women

I don't think that's as true as you're making it sound, but I don't spend much time in straight spaces so maybe it's cultural.

Two very different behaviours are getting conflated here.

Man who expresses and controls his emotions > man who doesn't express emotions > man who is controlled by his emotions.

> Is this deep deep flaw endemic to humanity across cultural lines?

Yes, almost certainly.

> Are millennials/ Gen Z the first generation where men anre (perhaps?) allowed to be almost as emotional as women?

This does not appear to be the case in my experience (as an elder millennial with Gen Z acquaintances). Although it surely varies by subculture and individual, in my experience women in the dating market still pretty strongly enforce pretty traditional gender roles for men. You can also see this in social media, notably TikTok - if you're familiar with the trend of young women talking about their "icks" (things that turn them off in men), you'll notice that the "icks" are usually about men being emotional, or being affected by their environment, or showing weakness in some (often trivial) way.

The degree to which someone's emotionality is endearing to another depends on how attractive they find the emotional person..

There's a fascinating internet trend named "Bronze Age Shitposting" - clips usually featuring The Epic of Gilgamesh as sung by Peter Pringle and/or Hymn to Ishtar as read by Karl Hecker, inserted into various scenes from movies, series etc.

Sometimes they refer to news in archeology of the related region/era, so I suppose we can expect a clip referring to the story from the article to appear soon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com