I’m slowly working my way through Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
Two generations later, in 522 BC, Darius (Dārayavauš), the Persian heir to Anshan, took control of the whole Persian empire, which by now extended from Egypt and Anatolia to the borders of India. Despite two abortive Elamite rebellions shortly after his accession, he chose Elam as the hub of this empire, with Susa itself (known to him as Šušan) as the administrative capital, and Parša, i.e. Anshan, as the site for a new ceremonial capital, to be better known in the West by its Greek name of Persepolis.
He goes on to make the following interesting observation:
The Persians had never prized literacy very highly. Famously, their leaders were educated in three things only: to ride a horse, to shoot a straight arrow, and to tell the truth. So their Elamite neighbours, with two thousand years of cuneiform education behind them, were well placed to be extremely useful in the more humdrum side of empire-building.
Which means the Elamites played the same role with respect to the Old Persians as the Persians played with respect to the Turks a millennium and a half later.
An amusing sidelight: “Nevertheless, Elamite must have continued to be spoken in Elam [after a long period of Akkadian domination], since in 1300 BC it springs back to life as the official language, replacing Akkadian for all written purposes, except curses.” (Emphasis added.)
My theory is vindicated. Just fill in the blanks.
See, I almost put in “be still, John Emerson’s beating heart” after the Dravidian reference, but I thought better of it.
Nah. Proto-Hungarians, the lot of them.
Ostler’s book is wonderful, but so dense. I take it up from time to time, chip off a few chunks of cortex candy, then set it aside while I relish those. Particularly useful for all that Mesopotamiana.
Does anyway know his account of the development and spread of Latin, Ad Infinitum? I’ve only caught the odd short description, but it appears to be equally fine. Reviews at Amazon are *****x7.
After reading about Ad Infinitum on this here never-to-be-praised-enough (onvolprezen) blog, I ordered it for the shop I work in, and have not looked back since. My customers are enthousiastic and they are usually classicists ( is that a word?… students/scholars of Latin & Greek) so they should know. Their verdict is that it is much but much much much better than “Latin” by Tore Jansson. I’ve bought them both for myself so soon enough I’ll see.
and Parša, i.e. Anshan, as the site for a new ceremonial capital, to be better known in the West by its Greek name of Persepolis.
But that’s not true.
Anshan lies 43 km west of Persepolis. I can’t find any reference to Ostler’s theory. I wonder if he just goofed.
Ostler’s book is wonderful, but so dense. I take it up from time to time, chip off a few chunks of cortex candy, then set it aside while I relish those.
Exactly.
I wonder if he just goofed.
Quite possibly. He is, after all, writing a popularization of a huge field of knowledge, and you can’t expect every detail to be perfect (I nitpicked a couple of things in my review of Ad Infinitum). If one is particularly interested in any detail, one should check it against other sources. But then, that’s true of just about any book.
Ahem… I see. Reviewed here while I was preoccupied with my Wikipedic adventures, it was. That’ll teach me.
OK, I’ll order Ad Infinitum and ever so slowly devour it also.
For all written purposes except curses? Harumph.
I think that the Wikipedia article gives an overly optimistic impression of the status of the Elamo-Dravidian proposal. Although it is not considered a crank hypothesis (the evidence put forward by McCalpin was valid in type) I think that it is generally regarded among historical linguists as unproven.
Were these serious formal curses, the kind where you try to get lightning or leprosy to strike the guy, or the kind of casual curses you ake when you drop something on your foot? My guess is that it was the former — cursing in those days was taken more seriously than it is with us.
And Poser is a partypooper.
He’s just doing his job. And I agree, the former is more likely.
Hi! Can I also be a partypooper? I actually spent time hoping to convince myself that Elamite and Dravidian were related, and ended up with nothing specific. Results are here, if anybody’s interested: http://starling.rinet.ru/Texts/elam.pdf. Sorry John Emerson. 🙂
There I want to bring up the paper that says there’s no evidence so far that Elamite is closer to Dravidian than English is, only to find that the author himself has already been here! 🙂
Elamite is a fascinating language as long as you don’t have to learn it. It’s one of two languages known to conjugate nouns: sunkik “I, the king”, sunkit “you, the king”, sunkir “(he,) the king”. The other noun-conjugating language is Nàmá.
——————–
However, let me mention another pet peeve: Of all scientists, only historical linguists ever use words like “proof”, and they really, really, really shouldn’t. “It’s unproven” is what creationists say about evolution because they don’t know what they’re talking about. (Of course it’s unproven, duh — science cannot prove, only disprove.)
Truth must always fight its way through a thicket of lies and error, but in the end it will always prevail.
David, George, Bill, and future John Doe partypoopers 1……n are all forgiven, of course, because the truth is unintelligible for those whose brains are infested with thetan engrams.
Clearly we are educated stupid.
(Warning: Follow this link at your own risk. It may damage your sanity. It’s legendary enough to have a Wikipedia entry, and the blog I read most frequently uses it as the measure of insanity on a logarithmic scale.)
Ostler’s book is entertaining, but I’d be sure to double-check anything he says. I wouldn’t want to claim any special expertise on the non-Middle Eastern side of things, but he makes plenty of goofs about that region. For example, he mentions that only Christians have managed to preserve Aramaic to the present date, although the Mandaic dialect was spoken up until the 8th century — which would come as a surprise to my Mandaean informants, who continue to use the modern form today in their daily life. Some of the stuff he says about Phoenician doesn’t sit well with me either; he says that it was unknown outside of its own settlements, which doesn’t explain why dialogue in Phoenician appears in one of Plautus’ plays, or why the last attestation of Phoenician is found in the hinterlands way to the south of Tunis and Tripoli.
He describes Ethiopia as a “Christian country,” which is somewhat inaccurate (perhaps a third or more Ethiopians are Muslim) and claims that Zoroastrianism survives only India (there are still perhaps 45,000 Zoroastrians in Iran itself).
There are other similar blunders, which do not exactly inspire me with confidence about the sections of the book that do not deal with the Middle East. I will say that I think he’s being more than a little silly when he says that the writing is on the wall for Chinese (p. 173).
There are Jewish and Muslim speakers of Aramaic, too.
(And BTW, there are dialects that have preserved the emphatics as ejectives to the present day…)
Actually, we historical linguists do not speak of “proof”. There’s a difference between saying that something is “unproven” and using the term “proof”, much less confusing scientific evidence with mathematical proof. The problem is what to say to a non-specialist audience. If we say “there is no good evidence that X is related to Y”, many non-specialists will take that to mean that nothing much has been adduced, when often it means that what evidence has been adduced, which may be quite a lot, is not probative. They will then look at a long list of putative cognates of the Greenbergian sort and say “what do you mean there’s no good evidence? There is piles of it?”
In any case, other scientists do also casually speak of “proof”. Here’s a biological example
Here’s a statement that: “a direct connection between aluminum, AD and disruption of Krebs cycle enzymes is yet to be fully proven.” from the European Journal of Biochemistry. Google will provide additional examples.
When talking about language relationships, I find the word ‘accepted’ to be useful.
The most widely accepted theory is that Vietnamese and Cambodian are related while Cambodian and Thai are not.
The grouping Ural-Altaic is no longer generally accepted as valid.
Not ideal, but not the worse either.
Actually, substituting “good evidence” for “proof” or vice versa does not solve the problem. If we say “this bunch of Greenbergian evidence does not prove that X is related to Y”, there’s nothing to stop non-specialists from questioning the validity of that statement either. The easiest way low probability relationship theories may be countered is through falsifying them with competing theories. For Elamite, I have tried to show that it is not difficult to put forward equally “strong” competing theories that relate it to almost any other family in Eurasia. I cannot say that this demonstration invalidates McAlpin’s hypothesis, or “disproves” it – it just shows that a close “Elamo-Dravidian” relationship isn’t the most probable reason for observed similarities between Elamite and Dravidian, not for now, at least.
Then just say “you said good evidence — this isn’t good evidence”.
Yes, but it’s remarkably rare, if I may switch into descriptive mode. Compare the usage of “shown” or “demonstrated”. (For example, instead of “is yet to be fully proven” in the example you quote, the people I know would have written “is yet to be demonstrated in detail”.)
Showing that one phylogenetic hypothesis is less parsimonious than another is how we do phylogenetics in biology. You have shown that for Elamite several previously overlooked hypotheses are just about as parsimonious as the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis, demonstrating that (based on the evidence known and examined so far) this hypothesis should not get preferred treatment, and also demonstrating that more research needs to be done.
IIRC Greenbergian methodology isn’t designed to ‘prove’ reations, only to disprove them. That is using his methods you can say two languages aren’t related (but not that two languages are related). A lot of the larger groupings are presumably just waiting for people to show they aren’t related after all.
I think even most “mainstream” linguists agree that you can’t ever ‘disprove’ relationships – you can really only say that the evidence is not good enough for suggesting a particularly close degree of relationship. So, to be more precise, if I say that there is no “Elamo-Dravidian”, what I really mean is that there is no closer link between Elamite and Dravidian than between Elamite and a whole bunch of other families, and that McAlpin’s evidence for establishing this closer link is insufficient. This doesn’t mean that Elamite and Dravidian can’t be related, along with other families, on a much higher level – but we certainly don’t have the sufficient evidence to demonstrate that now (although some hints look interesting).
My opinion is that Greenbergian methodology is great for working out preliminary hypotheses. It gives you ideas to work with, based on some rough concepts of phonetic typology, which can be later either molded into more solid scientific theories or discarded. It’s only when preliminary hypotheses start being treated as categoric statements that trouble begins.
Once again, I express my gratitude for the learned and stimulating comments that turn up on this blog, which is giving me at least as good an education as grad school did.
The things got more difficult for the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis on the ancient DNA front as well.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30967-5
The new paper of Shinde et al. characterizes the “Iranian-like” DNA component of the Indus Valley Civilization and finds out that it isn’t “sufficiently like” the known Iranian ancient samples, both from the proto-Elamite times and in the preceding millennia. The similarity between the Indus Valley component and the old Iranian specimens is consistent with a split between the two populations some 12,000 years ago, even before agriculture. (Of course it’s faintly possible that the dissimilarity isn’t really due to an ancient population split, but was caused by a more recent admixture from a different local population picked by the ancestors of the Harappans on their way East).
But the simplest hypothesis seem to be that the ancestors of the Indus Civilization learned agriculture somewhere in the region of Eastern Iran / Afrghanistan / India by a culture transfer from the West…
On a different note: is the linguistic prehistory of the Dravidian languages consistent with their arrival with the ancestors of the IVC?
On the other had, the other of the two recent papers (an updated version of Narasimhan preprint already discussed here) ( https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6457/eaat7487 ) favors the hypothesis of the Dravidian nature of the Indus Valley Culture based, largely, on the linguistic arguments (the contemporary Dravidians are characterized by prominent Ancestral Sound Indian DNA connection, which is derived from the two major components, an IVC-type DNA as well as a more ancient substrate DNA of the peninsular South Asia from before the agricultural times). They follow the books of Fortson 2011 and Parpola 2015 to argue that known IVC seals represent Dravidian words and names.
On the other hand, they cite Krishnamurti 2003 re: the proto-Dravidian reconstructions of the names of local animal and plants which (unless they were early borrowings picked by the invasive proto-Dravidians) would lend support for the local origins of the Dravidian languages.
Also related, a newspaper account of the recent deciphering of Linear Elamite writing system
https://jpost.com/archaeology/article-714651
Oh, that’s amazing. I’ve obtained access to the 50-page paper and… shall report back at… some point.
I was struck by the royal name Šilhaha, which is clearly Banana Language, like Inanna and Huwawa/Humbaba. Of course, kings don’t necessarily bear names that make sense in the countries they rule; I myself, descendant of kings, bear a name from the other end of the Mediterranean altogether.
Oh, that’s amazing. I’ve obtained access to the 50-page paper and… shall report back at… some point.
Amazing indeed — please do report back!
We discussed (an earlier press report on) Desset’s (claim of) decipherment here.
Oh dear. Cold water successfully dashed.
Well, I’m still curious. Convincingly shot down last year doesn’t mean it won’t be interesting to see the case carefully laid out in a scholarly article. And a storm among scholars could be very enlightening.
Well, this:
“To make things worse, several of the Linear Elamite and Proto-Elamite texts studied in Desset’s articles (in peer reviewed journals, it must be said) are regarded as modern fakes by many scholars. Even if they would not be, the Iranian government does not seem to be very bothered that most belong to a single private collection of obviously looted and illegally exported material. ”
…makes me quite suspicious of criticism. It’s politics:-/
“Convincingly shot down” – well, Desset’s article (sci-hub) looks normal. I would love to see comments (with all due respect: not about politics and not on FB) by specialists.
Did you see the part about how “several of the Linear Elamite and Proto-Elamite texts studied in Desset’s articles (in peer reviewed journals, it must be said) are regarded as modern fakes by many scholars”? That’s not politics. If you insist on taking everything seriously until it’s proven wrong to your satisfaction, you’re going to waste a lot of time. To me, if it smells fishy, it is fishy.
@LH, yes, and this comment is extremely fishy.
There is a story about “fakes” mentioned by Steve Farmer. But it has very little to do with Desset and Elamite and a lot to do with Steve.
The story: a collection (let’s call this collection “A”) of artifacts of unknown provenance surfaced in Iran. They were known as “artifacts from Jiroft”.
Steve did not like the fact that the international team who conducted the subsequent excavation (“B”) did not comment on the quality of the collection “A” (for him it is bending to the Iranian government’s will). Their dialogue can be found here.
What matters is that “A” has nothign to do with Desset and “B”.
In the course of the excavations “B” several tablets appeared. On one side they have strange signs (triangles, circles) “С”, on the other they have Elamite signs “D”.
According to Steve: “They included the following ludicrous example, whose many linguistic absurdities were analyzed on the List by me, Jacob Dahl, and others: …”
“(Jacob thinks that the “geometric” inscriptions may have been superimposed by modern forgers on top of reworked ancient tablets of unknown provenance carrying a few real linear Elamite signs. But there are problems with that thesis too, given the paucity of legitimate linear Elamite tablets; hopefully we can take that issue up further on the List when he’s around.)”
According to Steve people on the list based on photographs believe that “C” is fake, but “D” is not necessary fake.
Accroding to an artcile in Science Dahl believes that “C” are fake: ‘Dahl recalls. “No specialist in the world would consider these to be anything but absolute fakes.” ‘
… while Madjidzadeh (the Iranian archaeologist ) and Holly Pittman who works with Madjidzadeh believe they are real: ‘“They will be shown to be fools when he pulls out 1000 tablets,” she predicts‘
You can read about it here.
Now “C” whose autencity IS questioned have nothing to do with Elamite. But they have to do with Desset: Desset, who also works with Iranians published an article about them where he believs there are real.
To sum it up: Iranians and archaeologists working with them believe “C” are real, Steve and Dahl beleive they are fake. For Steve it is a sign of Desset’s idiocy.
As for “D”, they have to do with Elamite, but even Dahl thinks they can be real, and even though they are included by Desset in his list of Elamite inscriptions (as B’, C’, D’ ) , each of them is just a few symbols (6, 7 and 9).
I am sorry for flooding, but if these are the “fakes” in question, I don’t see how it has anythign to do with Elamite.
It is just two rival groups of irresponsible archaeologists having different opinions on some unrelated inscription.
Whether it is fake or not, I am not ready to believe that Madjidzadeh, Pittman and Desset are acting in bad faith, that all of their other scientific contibutions are fishy and that all of this is Iranian conspiracy.
There is another story about fakes – about the “gunagi” vessels.
It can be found on p13 in Desset’s own artcile:
This sort of implies there was some discussion of authencity of those beakers. I am not going to search for it.
If for you the above story means “everything that Desset does is fishy” – well, I am afraid that means that everything that Iranians archaeologists and archaeologists who work with Iranians do is fishy.
And that is what that FB guy said!
For me it is different. When I see a line “several texts. …are regarded as modern fakes by many scholars” in a political comment, I expect somethig like the above.
Most of what Zahi Hawass “publishes” is nonsense.
Fakes are a serious issue.
Genuine artifacts considered fake just because “every idiot would say they’re fake” is a serious issue (Altamira).
To me the “geometrical” symbols look very suspicious. They are very much unlike what I expect from the period – they are unlike normal fakes! But I am not an expert.
And I do not expect every archaeoligist to be able to tell a fake artefact from a genuine one. Moreover, there are situations when it is Absolutely Obvious that something genuine is fake – Altamira.
Also, it is plausible that Iranian community as a whole is quite willing to accept fakes.
To deal with this, you need to analyse them. Not just photographs: if a work has implications for the history of art, you can’t analyse it based on the history of art or you will call “fake” everything new. You need to analyze the technique and materials. An open discussion in peer reviewed journals possibly could help.
But vague suggestions that some unnamed people regard some unnamed work fake made in FB in order to discredit unrelated works by a scholar whose opinion on a potential fake differs, just because the guy is French and you don’t have common freinds with him?! That harms.
Well, I think the FB commenters meant texts on silver vessels.
Cf. François Desset, ‘Linear Elamite writing’, in lvarez-Mon J., Basello G.P. Wicks Y. (ed.), The Elamite World, Routledge (2018):
Jacob L. Dahl (2009) Early Writing in Iran, a Reappraisal, Iran, 47:1, 23-31,
And a funny quote by Jean-Jacques Glassner from another chapter (Writing in Elam) in the same volume:
“According to Jacob Dahl (2009), linear writing was not a true writing and, therefore, it will never be deciphered!”
No, it is not fishy. It is a reason for caution: if you have no means to confirm authencity of an inscription other than aksing the guy who excavated it, you keep in mind that it can be fake.
If they comprise a sigfnifican part of your whole corpus you have a choice (start from them but control their contribution. How much of your interpretation hinges on these texts? How much is their content consistent with everything? Or start from more reliable texts and when you have a reading, try it on those vessels).
Eventually it is a question of how you come up with your reading, but both approaches converge on that you will have to demonstrate to which exact extent your reading depends on them. It can also be a way to prove their authencity.
Desset published them, took samples (that is, the owner allowed him to cut off small pieces?) and took those to a lab. What else he was expected to do?
The guy-who-loves-to-write-bullshit-about-colleagues-in-FB (I leave the exact wrods I have for this scholar to readers imagination, but they are rude) managed to find words that make Desset look fishy just because the corpus is what it is. And what does “looted” mean? Are we going to exclude Venus de Milo from art history?
I had gotten the impression that this is a case where a putative writing system that had not been understood at all is claimed to be completely deciphered in one fell swoop, and that it all rests on a bunch of recently published inscriptions that may all be fakes.
I’ve started reading the paper. The first few pages make clear that deciphering Linear Elamite has been a cumulative effort, with works from 1905, 1912, 1924, 1962, 1971, 1986 and 2018 proposing sound values for a few glyphs; most of those values turn out to be correct or close. Footnote 5 says that the publication of 8 inscribed silver beakers by Desset (2018b) “also included inscription L’, from the art market. This text, however, proved to be meaningless and is probably to be regarded as a fake. For this reason, it is not considered here.” Footnote 8 continues: “For this reason, some glyph numbers were modified compared to the previously publisehd list of Desset (2018b, 110, fig. 4).”
…and that’s it so far. I’m on the 16th page and have to go.
“suppressed” in footnote 8 means “deleted” – supprimés.
The wiki has a surprisingly sober summary for Linear Elamite, right up to the Desset et al paper, and making clear it’s been a cumulative effort. There’s also an acknowledgment of forgeries. Nice photos of knobbly carvings.
Of course the recent edits might have been by Desset’s team, or somebody just summarising that paper uncritically. At least it’s fairly digestible, unlike the paper itself.
I don’t see, though, how we gain any insight as to appraising the fakes. If Desset et al claim what they’re looking at is mostly genuine, whereas Foreman claims they’re mostly fakes; and undoubtedly there’s heavy political intrusion … ?
Oh, and the ubiquitous Starostin wrote ‘ON THE GENETIC AFFILIATION OF THE ELAMITE LANGUAGE’ back in 2002. My spam feed is undoubtedly monitoring my browser history.
No, his not yet ubiquitous son. I actually recommend the paper, which has a mostly negative conclusion: no reason to assume a relationship specifically with Dravidian (as had been proposed), or with anything else except maybe very, very distantly.
Fun fact: the page preceding that paper belongs to a proposal to decipher a few Linear Elamite inscriptions!
David Marjanović :
>Elamite is a fascinating language as long as you don’t have to learn it. It’s one of two languages known to conjugate nouns: sunkik “I, the king”, sunkit “you, the king”, sunkir “(he,) the king”. The other noun-conjugating language is Nàmá
How is that different from what certain Bulgarian dialects, mostly Rhodopean, and some Macedonian do with definite articles (proximal medial and distant) — three degrees of distance; genuinely interested. Are you using a different meaning of “conjugation”?
It’s not degrees of distance (though I didn’t know about that either), it actually lines up with the grammatical persons. It’s also different from Turkish one-word sentences like Kitap. “This is a book.” (and likewise in, say, Nahuatl). We’ve had a bit of discussion here, continued here and later here.
Me in 2022:
Me in 2008:
Here, that is.
It’s a correct impression:-/
“Putative” – cf. above: “According to Jacob Dahl (2009), linear writing was not a true writing and, therefore, it will never be deciphered!”
“Is claimed” – I don’t know about completely and swoop, but some people may have have such an impression from nespaper headlines.
“It all rests” – ‘Pour François Desset, le “déclic” du déchiffrement s’est produit en 2017 lors de l’analyse d’un corpus de 8 textes rédigés sur des vases en argent, qualifiés de “vases gunagi”‘,
“recently published” – Mahboubian’s catalogue published in 2004. The texts published by Desset in 2018.
“may be fakes” – Yes. Maybe.
Just remember that it is good to publish inscriptions.
You are dealing with an emotional associative chain “we don’t know if it is real, ergo it is a ‘bad inscription’, a scholar published it, ergo he is ‘a scholar who publishes bad inscriptions’ =’bad’ scholar“.
Nahuatl conjugates nouns.
It’s generally a safe bet that a statement that “X is one of only two languages known to do Y” is false.
“Two”, as Asimov reminds us, “is impossible.”
It is also a bad design choice, as Knuth teaches. There should either be one “slot” that the programmer manages and knows they have to manage, or a virtual infinity. All else leads to damnation in the form of buffer overflows.
Given the long and cumulative history of the decipherment of Linear Elamite, this was an outlier, not textbook wisdom.
“Well, they were wrong then, weren’t they.”
New paper, p. 13:
“While the door was unlocked in 2018 and opened in 2019, it is time now to enter the room fully and propose the near-complete decipherment of Linear Elamite. Editions of all the known LE inscriptions will follow in a separate work (Desset [e. a.], forthcoming), which will soon appear as a volume in the open-access series OrientLab Series Maior of the University of Bologna (www.orientlab.net/pubs/). However, two texts are preliminarily edited here: M in section 3.2 and F // G // H (Puzur-Sušinak; 22nd century BCE) in section 6.”
Inscription M was published in 1935, F, G and H (one text in triplicate) in 1908 (see table 1). This means uncontroversially genuine inscriptions can be read with the new decipherment, while the probable fake L’, which was only published in 2018, cannot.
So if the decipherment is based on fakes, the forger must have been able to read Linear Elamite correctly…!!!
OK, but it’s so different from Elamite that I can’t tell if it’s doing the same thing. Elamite is almost what you get when you take something in shouting distance from SAE (Georgian, say) and slap noun conjugation on it. Nahuatl is very much not.
Of course I hardly know anything about Nama either…
“this was an outlier, not textbook wisdom.”
Yes. Dahl (Jacob L. Dahl (2009) Early Writing in Iran, a Reappraisal, Iran, 47:1, 23-31, T&F, sci-hub) notes that some texts are anomalous (“O” is a catalogue of singletons) and proposes to divide the corpus in two parts: a few monumental inscriptions in Susa that repeat same texts with insertions, and tablets.
The latter are much less uniform, and his idea is that some of those can be related to the signs of monumental inscriptions about the same way as writing of Silas John to English, while others are “perhaps abracadabra texts written for religious reasons”.
Have we discussed Silas John here?
“Have we discussed Silas John here?”
sci-hub
“So if the decipherment is based on fakes, the forger must have been able to read Linear Elamite correctly…!!!”
@DM, yes, it is exactly what Desset and his readers should try to do: to demonstrate that this is the case. This would mean that the vessels are likely genuine.
Is there any chance they could find some physical evidence like the Praeneste fibula where there was surface crystallization proving that the forgery happened at least 2000 years ago?
(If a forgery happened 2500 years ago, like selling some copy of a statue as an original by Phidias, is it still a forgery now? Cf. paintings mostly made by some assistant in Rembrandt’s workshop — if there are no paintings that Rembrandt made all on his own, are they all fakes?)
Manius fefaked me for Numerius.
@DE: Finally, the correct reading
That’s exactly what they’re doing on pp. 29–32. In the footnotes they document which texts a deciphered phrase occurs in, and many of them are in the texts that were found earliest. In fig. 7a–b they show which glyphs occur in which texts; most glyphs occur in the texts found long before 2018 (numbered A through U), and, remember, the authors claim “most of” these texts “are reasonably comprehensible” now (p. 45). Notably, “text” M (pp. 37–38, 49) turns out to be a fragment of a school tablet:
e u o a i
-p pe pu [2 x damage] pi
-m me [hapax] mo ma mi
The edition, transcription and translation of Text F = G = H occupies pp. 55–57.
The acknowledgments make clear that the paper was peer-reviewed.
I said “try”, because the level of an almost-proof is hard to achieve (it is more like a direction) and because I still haven’t properly read the paper myself:))
“Notably, “text” M (pp. 37–38, 49) turns out to be a fragment of a school tablet“*
Dahl mentioned it: “The non-display texts form a very uneven corpus. Some texts such as O consist exclusively of singletons (hapax legomena) (see also texts R, L, M, N all having almost only singletons)”
—-
* Barely a millenium since they invented writing and they have schools! I told, school is the most conservative institution ever! 5 millenia and nothign, nothign, nothign have fucking changed!
They had homework in Sumer.
Do that. I think you’ll like it. 🙂
They had homework in Sumer.
Indeed. I don’t recall the name offhand but there’s a fairly early pair of tablets (apparently from ca. 2500 BC) with answers to the same math problem; one is perfectly correct (though arguably with too much precision), one is subtly wrong (and there were apparently several articles trying to explain what exactly went wrong; AFAIK the best explanation so far also has to do with precision).
[The problem, slightly paraphrased: how many portions of grain there are in one standard granary, at 7 measures per portion? The answer is 164571 3/7, and one version says exactly this (or at least the closest it could get in contemporary math symbols), while the other says 164160, which apparently is what happens if the calculations are rounded down to an intermediate unit.]
Just came across an article (from 2019) about using computational methods to analyse proto-Elamite texts. I’ve only had time to skim it, but they seem pretty sober in their discussion (that is, the methods they use mostly reproduce known patterns but also identify new potentially significant groups of signs/texts to look into; not as sexy as solving proto-Elamite with AI, but definitely a more useful application of the technology), also, the research team includes both specialists in the ancient Near East and in computer science, which usually works out better than just one side of the equation.