Digital cuneiforms: Updated tool expands access to ancient Hittite texts
17 comments
·March 27, 2025staplung
thaumasiotes
> Lately they've been trying to get me into some kind of currency scheme.
If you mean coins, those are thought to be significantly more recent than the Hittites.
If you mean trade that is, for convenience, denominated in quantities of a reference commodity, that's much, much older. Everyone was doing that before anyone had noticed the Hittites.
marci
They may be talking of this new, decentralized, open-sea, counterfeit-proof currency I've heard fishermen raving about. It's called cowrie. But some friends working in the mines think it's a joke and it will soon crash.
thaumasiotes
Silver in standardized amounts as a form of payment is attested before the Hittites are. (The same goes for grain, obviously.) Cowries as payment are from an entirely separate region, but presumably were no more difficult to produce than smelted metals were.
JoeDaDude
The tool url is not listed in TFA, but a simple google search results in the following:
pabs3
Why do journalists not reference the things they are reporting on these days?
SuperNinKenDo
The cynic in me says that it may be to avoid pushing the original source to the top of results, ensuring their secondary reporting gets more clicks. But the realist says that it's sheer laziness.
mmooss
If we wanted to digitize all ancient texts, what would it take? How many are there? Starting at the beginning of written history ~5,200 years ago to ~2,000 years ago, how many texts do we have from each millenia or century? Are they accessible to be digitized?
What about earlier symbols and similar potential communication? For example, caves sometimes have marks that seems to have some symbolic meaning, such as slashes that seem like counts. How many are there to digitize?
I'm curious about the scale of it.
wongarsu
Specifically for cuneiform, there are multiple efforts, covering roughly the time period you mentioned. There is this post, [1], and [2].
There are probably around 1-2 million cuneiform tablets that have been found so far. Many of them complete, but even more of them as fragments. Those fragments mostly just sit around in store rooms. It's a giant puzzle few people even have enough knowledge to attempt.
mmooss
Great, thanks. I've run across ORACC before, but I didn't know widespread digitization was part of their aim (i.e., I had the impression it was a database of artifacts digitized elsewhere).
> There are probably around 1-2 million cuneiform tablets that have been found so far. Many of them complete, but even more of them as fragments.
That's a pretty amazing number - that so many have survived. It seems like it would take too much luck, unless some library has endured this long.
thaumasiotes
Those tablets are indestructible once you expose them to fire. The records come from sacked cities. There's no shortage.
observationist
More than $5 million, probably less than $100 million, probably - would need a team of qualified experts to know what to photograph and record, a team trained to handle delicate and valuable artifacts, IT people, machine learning experts, gophers, grunts, and finally a team of people to work with institutions. It's not a super complex endeavor, logistically speaking.
I don't think it'll ever happen. Some institutions would resist being part of any third party scaled up attempt to record things, others would demand editorial control, and the most asinine petty politics would gum things up.
jdthedisciple
...and more importantly, could we then leverage LLMs to fill in the blanks of ancient history?
mmooss
What blanks, and how could LLMs accurately fill them?
null
Better access for Hittie texts? I'm already deluged with nešili texts of the "Triple your barley yields with this one weird trick" type or, "Phrygian raiders don't want you to know this secret". Lately they've been trying to get me into some kind of currency scheme. I'll stick with bartering, thank you very much.
I'm thinking of just blocking all cuneiform texts.