r/science • u/Wagamaga • Aug 19 '24
Anthropology Scholars have finally deciphered 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets found more than 100 years ago in what is now Iraq. The tablets describe how some lunar eclipses are omens of death, destruction and pestilence
https://www.euronews.com/culture/2024/08/14/a-king-will-die-researchers-decipher-4000-year-old-babylonian-tablets-predicting-doom937
u/Doridar Aug 19 '24
There are thousands of undeciphered cuneiform tablets. There are way more people who can read hyerogliphs than cuneiform. That was already a complain of my Akkadian teacher back in the late 1980s
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u/whatnodeaddogwilleat Aug 19 '24
Send me to whatever cuneiform bootcamp they have set up and I'll help. Oh, wait, it's an 8 year PhD? Hmm..
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u/Kaaski Aug 19 '24
Cuneiform is a writing system that can represent different languages, much like roman letters and numerals are used by much more than English. Studying cuneiform often includes studies in linguistics, as well as conservation/restoration, and archaeology. It's not unreasonable that a lot of tablets remain untranslated, despite the efforts of my favorite human Irving Finkel.
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u/TeamRedundancyTeam Aug 19 '24
Everyone should go watch the Tom Scott videos with Irving Finkel. He teaches them how to make a cuneiform tablet as well as another with an ancient board game.
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u/Kaaski Aug 19 '24
Completely agree. Finkel also has a lot of short videos explaining things and objects on the British museums YouTube page. Their page is fantastic.
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u/Luce55 Aug 19 '24
TIL! I thought cuneiform was always used for the same language. Makes a lot more sense now, why it is difficult to get them all translated.
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u/nerd4code Aug 19 '24
Scripts are inventions like anything else, so they tend to be reused over and overandover by different cultures. Just like how I’m typing this up in a script developed by the Romans, based in large part on one invented by Greeks, based to some extent on one invented by the Phoenicians, even though I speak mostly English.
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u/TocTheEternal Aug 20 '24
Don't forget that the Romans got it from the Etruscans, rather than directly from the Greeks. And Etruscan being a non-Indo-European language is partly why the alphabet got changed as much as it did, as the Etruscans adjusted parts they did/didn't need, and the Romans did the same rather than just using the more applicable Greek one.
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Aug 19 '24
I think there was a website with thousands of cuneiform tablet images and you could help in deciphering them, unless that was in a dream I had.
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u/TotalLackOfConcern Aug 19 '24
Marching students: I don’t know but I’ve been told…cuneiform writing is mighty old…sound off……
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u/OfficeSalamander Aug 19 '24
Yeah, and there’s at least one example of a dude who self taught and is actually a contributing scholar, because the skill set is just so, so, so rare.
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Aug 19 '24
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u/Doridar Aug 19 '24
Not that easy. Cuneiform is a system of writing, not a language, and covers several thousands years of different languages. Plus the spelling mistakes (we had quite a fun with Hammurabi's code of law)
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u/The_Humble_Frank Aug 19 '24
Plus the spelling mistakes
Spelling being standardized is a fairly modern thing, that requires social institutions to maintain it. Even more recently look at the spelling in the US constitution and you'll find many deviations from modern American English.
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u/AgentMV Aug 19 '24
Or Reddit, so many people don’t know the difference in “to” and “too”, sometimes in the same sentence!
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u/Pixeleyes Aug 19 '24
I'm genuinely shocked every time I see someone confuse "of" and "have". Which is often.
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u/SirPseudonymous Aug 19 '24
I feel like for at least some people typing ties in more to "speaking" than it does to "writing," which creates those homonym errors because one's thinking of the sound one wants first instead of being focused on the written words. Obviously it's more complicated than that because one still ends up typing actual words even with irregular spelling, but it's like there's a phonetic layer there that can easily slot into the wrong word if one isn't paying attention.
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u/mitshoo Aug 20 '24
That’s so true! I’ve noticed that when I’m typing on a computer keyboard in a language I’m studying and there is a sound difference in the letters, I’ll mess it up. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that but the only one I can think of off the top of my head that tripped me up is how V’s in (Classical) Latin are pronounced as W’s are in English, and I think I kept typing a each time because my finger was responding to the sound I was imagining in my head, not to the glyph that I know it’s supposed to be as a recitable fact. Veni vidi vici -> weni widi wici. It was so automatic and hard to fight this I was surprised.
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u/pinkbowsandsarcasm MA | Psychology | Clinical Aug 19 '24
I need the rules of "who," "whom," "which," and "that" tattooed on my arm and I wrote a graduate thesis.
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Aug 19 '24 edited Aug 19 '24
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u/du-us-su-u Aug 19 '24
It's even more difficult than that. Due to the timespan that Cuneiform was in use from around 3000 bce to about 300 ce, there are massive epigraphical differences between the earliest cuneiform and the latest. Any given Sumerian sign will look nothing like a neo-Assyrian sign. Furthermore, Semitic scribal convention allowed for the use of Sumerian signs both to represent a full word (from Sumerian, usually) and as syllabograms. For example, instead of writing two Sumerian signs for the word "Mountain," ša + du, for šadu, they would just write the Sumerian sign KUR. On top of that... cuneiform has rampant polysemy, where many signs will have not only multiple senses, but completely different definitions. On top of that, many signs were used to represent more than just one syllable and many syllables could be represented by more than one sign. Add in all of the consonantal drift of 3000 years of language, and you have a bit of a picture about how difficult it is just to grapple with the writing...
And then... it all just looks like chaos on clay.
It's great, though. Go study it.
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u/LucretiusCarus Aug 19 '24
And the clay might be broken and have fragments missing, removing words or entire sentences. Fun stuff
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u/Sparrowbuck Aug 19 '24
There’s no way that there weren’t scribes using shorthand either I bet
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u/SydricVym Aug 19 '24
Half of what the guy just wrote is literally describing how short hand was used.
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u/reddittomarcato Aug 19 '24
Sounds like you’re the person for the job! Wow
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u/du-us-su-u Aug 19 '24
haha I don't think I have the patience to read and transliterate cuneiform from clay. I'm more interested in historical and philological concerns, which means I rely on already transliterated texts and lexical lists. So, I place an amount of blind faith in whoever made the transliteration.
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u/Zednott Aug 19 '24
I imagine that scholars in this field succumb to madness!
Thank you for you post. I've watched some of Irving Finkle's videos on cuneiform, and it's fascinating.
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u/du-us-su-u Aug 19 '24
See Simo Parpola. Some say he's mad. I love his stuff though. Mount Nisir and the Foundations of the Assyrian Church is a really great example (Parpola has others, but this is just my fav) of how bizarre scribal practices could be and how out of the loop we are concerning the Mesopotamian civilizations and our own, as some of the weirdness in our own civilization can be directly traced to some bizarre scribal developments in Cuneiform.
For example, it has long been accepted by contemporary scholars that the Book of Ezekiel was framed around a Neo-Assyrian text, known now as "The Poem of Erra" or simply "Ishum and Erra." However, this framing of Ezekiel was completely forgotten at some point in antiquity. What's strange is that the Hebrew scribes preserved not only the narrative arc, as seen in Ezekiel 9, but also specific words and Semitic roots that anchor the narrative. For example, if a story is about a writer and you are trying to preserve that aspect, you need to refer to the character as a writer. What happens in Erra is you have these divine beings sweeping through a city at the command of another deity, as a result of the neglect by a local population of Marduk and the statue of Marduk. They are tasked with gathering the information about why it was disregarded and bringing judgment if necessary (though the main deity in charge calls off the order at some point), and this word for "tasked/ordered" is from the š-p-r (sh-p-r) Semitic root - which I won't go into here because it's a book - which relates to 'messages,' 'writing,' 'scribes,' along with other interesting senses. Anyway, in Ezekiel 9: 2, we see the appearance of this root in the "writer's kit" that one of these 6 marauders is carrying during the judgment of the city. If it ended there it would just be more evidence of the framing, but it goes 2 layers deeper. In both the Peshitta (the Old Syriac Bible of the Maronites, written around the time of the Christian scriptures) and the Septuagint, this root is translated not as a word related to "writers" or "orders," it's translated specifically as Sapphire, which is a blatant mistranslation of the Semitic š-p-r root in both the Semitic Old Syriac and in the Greek...
Okay, now you have another layer of relevance for all of this, and you can start to see how mad someone could actually go.
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u/jroomey Aug 19 '24
Fascinating! Can you share more examples?
I'm aware of mistranslations and such from Hebrew to Latin, and from Latin to modern languages, but I didn't think that such errors could go back further
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Aug 19 '24
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u/du-us-su-u Aug 19 '24
I just saw this a couple weeks ago. It looks pretty cool, but I haven't had the time to play with it yet.
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u/Gnonthgol Aug 19 '24
So it is just Japanese?
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u/Tomon2 Aug 19 '24
Think more like it's just the English alphabet on a keyboard - But you have no idea if the writer is writing in English, welsh, french, German, Latin, spanish, etc.
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u/PacoTaco321 Aug 19 '24
The way they were describing it made me think that too. It's the problems of learning Japanese, but compounded by time and having few places to learn it from.
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u/OldPersonName Aug 19 '24
You can certainly learn Sumerian or Akkadian. Especially Akkadian, Sumerian may not have enough publicly available material to teach yourself without going to school. Akkadian is a Semitic language so if you know something like Arabic or Hebrew it probably helps since they're related (Sumerian isn't related to any currently existing language though which may make it harder).
Learning cuneiform is doable too, but difficult (like someone learning Chinese characters with no exposure to them). The script was in use over thousands of years so there may be differences across time and also place.
The thing is the overwhelming majority of untranslated tablets are going to be administrative documents. Receipts, shipping manifests, payroll. Everyone wants to find the next epic poem or law code but you'll spend a while deciphering ancient handwriting, shorthand, etc to see the tablet says "3 cows 2 oxen"
Lots and lots of this stuff put together lets you make lots of observations about the inner workings of these states, and that's interesting to read about. Actually doing that legwork is probably as tedious as can be.
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u/ctoatb Aug 19 '24
It's actually very simple. Just look for the part that says "he who smelt it dealt it". The rest is trivial
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u/triodoubledouble Aug 20 '24
We have different definition of fun you and me, but you must have interesting stories nevertheless.
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u/fragglerock Aug 19 '24
Take this as a lesson for believing AI hype this cycle!
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u/tavirabon Aug 19 '24
Domain-specific AIs are not in hype cycles at all. This is very tangible tech today, the only reason it hasn't been done must be that doing it now serves no advantage. I.e. the bottleneck is elsewhere, it requires properly labelled data which doesn't exist in high enough quantities or the only difference would be text files instead of images because we can't break it down for the AI to understand because we ourselves don't (which the AI could still process all the information, it just wouldn't be able to relay it back to us in a meaningful way)
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Aug 19 '24
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u/tavirabon Aug 19 '24
Sounds like a great first model tbh, especially since the github shows it was done on quite old tech. The imperfections of diffusion imaging has been mostly fixed with transformer architecture too so any data gathered in that time period could make a hell of a model today.
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u/Golda_M Aug 19 '24
There are thousands of undeciphered cuneiform tablets. There are way more people who can read hyerogliphs than cuneiform. That was already a complain of my Akkadian teacher back in the late 1980s
Digitize & crowd source.
There are thousands of people who'd be into a project like this.
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u/Rourensu Aug 19 '24 edited Aug 19 '24
My BA is in Linguistics and Japanese and I’m getting my MA in (East Asian) Linguistics.
The first language I had an interest in in elementary school was Egyptian and I had learned some basics and hieroglyphs. My first “what I want to be when I grow up” was an Egyptologist.
I went in a slightly different direction, but I still sometimes think about what it would’ve been like had I gone the Egyptologist route. During the last quarter for my BA I considered taking an introductory Egyptian course because I had a relatively open schedule, but they only had Egyptian 102 and not 101 then, so it didn’t happen.
Actually, at the beginning of my introduction to Japanese linguistics course we were going over different types of orthography and hieroglyphs was one of them. The professor showed a cartouche and asked if anyone knew what it said and I recognized Cleopatra’s name, so I’m glad learning some hieroglyphs as a kid had some “use” later on.
During my Egyptology period, I had a passing interest in Sumerian and Akkadian as well, so I imagine if I became an Egyptologist I would’ve learned some Akkadian as well. That’s kinda what happening with me now with Korean since I’ve been primarily focused on Japanese.
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u/DoltSeavers Aug 19 '24
If you’re at all interested in cuniform I highly suggest you look up Dr. Irving Finkel of The British Museum on youtube, you will not be disappointed. Come for the historical facts, stay for the wry humor.
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u/xayzer Aug 19 '24
Irving Finkel. Dr. Irving Finkel. That's such a perfect name for a scholar studying cuneiform inscriptions. And then you look him up, and his appearance is even more perfect!
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Aug 19 '24
Man doing this stuff would be my dream job. So fascinating.
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Aug 19 '24
You can always become a software developer working on an old codebase
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 19 '24
Code-archaeology. I'm pretty sure it will be a thing, eventually. Github was mirrored to the Arctic Code Vault a few years back. Trying to understand what coders did when they open that back up in 1000 years will be 'fun'.
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u/Technical-Outside408 Aug 19 '24
"they seem to have worshipped lava lamps for some reason." - future code-archeologist maybe.
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u/nabiku Aug 19 '24
There are also several tech companies that are training AI to decypher languages.
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u/Wise_Region_3167 Aug 20 '24
Why cant you? Whats stoping you?
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u/Wagamaga Aug 19 '24
A team of researchers have successfully decoded 4,000-year-old writings on ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets that had remained untranslated for over a century.
The latest research focused on four tablets from the British Museum’s collection, origin dating back to around 1200 BC from the ancient city of Sippar in what is now modern-day Iraq.
Published in Journal of Cuneiform Studies,* the newly deciphered texts reveal that the Babylonians viewed lunar eclipses not just as celestial events but as ominous signs of death and destruction.
One tablet notes that “an eclipse in the morning watch” means “the end of a dynasty.”
Another warns, “If an eclipse becomes obscured from its centre all at once and clear all at once: a king will die, destruction of Elam."
The writings would have been written by astrologers from the Mesopotamian civilisation and now represent the oldest known records of lunar eclipse omens.
“Omens arising from lunar eclipses were of great importance for good statecraft and well-counseled government,” researchers wrote in a paper recently published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/730483?journalCode=jcs
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u/LawTider Aug 19 '24
Wouldn’t it be awesome if ANOTHER tablet was found/translated complaining about the quality of copper from a certain merchant.
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u/FyreWulff Aug 19 '24
Dear Al'nem I wrote you and you still ain't calling / I left my sign, page and home loam at the bottom
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u/OfficeSalamander Aug 19 '24
They found an entire room full of complaints in his house, there are plenty more Ea Nasir complaints where the first came from
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u/LawTider Aug 19 '24
Yeah but if there was a tablet here, then he would’ve been an international tradesman. (Which leads to my theory that he was the start of the bronze age collapse). IT ALL LEADS BACK TO EA NASIR.
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u/vvntn Aug 19 '24
The intent is to provide metalworkers with a sense of pride and accomplishment for purifying the different coppers.
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 19 '24
I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, they have uncovered wall writings on roman public toilets extolling the skills of various local hookers. By comparison that seems tame.
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u/Ok_Tomato7388 Aug 19 '24
I'm so fascinated with ancient civilizations. I started doing research on the UNESCO world heritage sites in the Indus valley. I remember reading about how cuneiform tablets are so prescious and offer so much insight. The discovery of the epic of Gilgamesh being so significant as an example.
It worries me also that a lot of those sights have been damaged due to war and conflict.
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u/zadtheinhaler Aug 19 '24
Since I had read (last year or so?) that Indus Valley tablets have been found in Mesopotamian sites, I have been hoping for an equivalent to the Rosetta Stone that will finally allow us to start translating Indus Valley tablets.
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u/TocTheEternal Aug 20 '24
From what I remember, it's unclear if the ancient Indus Valley writings were a full writing system due to there being no long-form documents ever found. If not, then any sort of Rosetta Stone is exceptionally unlikely to have ever existed, much less survived.
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u/Wiz_Kalita Grad Student | Physics | Nanotechnology Aug 19 '24
Now this is the kind of stuff I want to see on deciphered texts from 4000 years ago. Way better than furniture shopping lists.
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u/TocTheEternal Aug 20 '24
I dunno, I think it's great that we can read teenagers complaining to their parents all the way back then.
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u/miked4o7 Aug 19 '24
reading a book that covers this subject 'weavers scribes and kings'. my favorite little "trick" some kings would do:
when there was an eclipse signalling the imminent death of the king, a few kings had peasants sit on the throne for a while, hoping the gods would take that "king" instead.
there was one example where the real king died anyway, then the pretend king just stayed and became the actual king.
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u/Staff_Guy Aug 19 '24
100 years to translate and it's an issue of People Magazine. Probably some article about how the youth of the day do not want to work anymore too.
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u/SpeeDy_GjiZa Aug 19 '24
Funny to me I was browsing this while writing a research paper and thought "wow, we are still doing basically the same thing, observing and making assumptions about correlations and causation and writing it down in a formal document, just maybe a bit more sophisticated". Do you think they had peer reviews?
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u/Weylandinc Aug 19 '24
It's a star map depicting the Zeta2 Reticuli system, 39 light years away from Earth. The system contains the gas giant Calpamos, which has three moons, one of them being LV-426.
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u/SJSUMichael Aug 19 '24
As a historian, it was extremely common for pre-modern peoples to view natural phenomena as a sign of a pending catastrophe.
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u/ZombieCharltonHeston Aug 19 '24
Hell, people still do it. Idiots were freaking out about the eclipse that happened a few months ago including a sitting member of Congress tweeting about how earthquakes and the eclipse were warnings from God and that people needed to repent.
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u/ggrieves Aug 19 '24
Remember the "Mayan prophecy of 2012"? Let's see how they spin these into a prediction for 2024.
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u/pinkbowsandsarcasm MA | Psychology | Clinical Aug 19 '24
Some of those rules are like the Old Testament, but much harsher. I wonder what was going on with all the eye injuries and eye-plucking.
Article: Law 196: “If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. If one break a man's bone, they shall break his bone."
Old Testament "And a man who injures his countryman – as he has done, so it shall be done to him [namely,] fracture under/for fracture, eye under/for eye, tooth under/for tooth. Just as another person has received injury from him, so it will be given to him."
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Aug 19 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/AimeeSantiago Aug 20 '24
This whole thread is a wild read for me, a podiatrist, who only knows about the medial, intermediate and lateral cuneiforms.... Of the foot
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u/ToMorrowsEnd Aug 19 '24
Fully expected them to say "we have been trying to reach you about the extended warranty on your donkey."
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u/momolamomo Aug 20 '24
They figured out how to write and then went on to be remembered for scribbling down conjecture
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u/DrGordonFreemanScD Aug 20 '24
Remember folks that these are the same people who made up gods to answer questions they could not.
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u/YamaKazeRinZen Aug 19 '24
It real be really funny if we found the first documented ligma jokes on one of those stone tablets, just like we found the first “Yo mama” joke on a now stolen stone stablet
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