Somewhat related, since we're talking about cuneiform: Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum telling the surprisingly amusing story of how he discovered the oldest known version of the Noah's Ark story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I
Source article in the journal Iraq: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S002108892...
Interesting literacy regression: this newly discovered Babylonian hymn was routinely copied by schoolchildren 3,000 years ago, while yesterday's article about why English doesn't use accents showed that by 1100 AD European literacy had contracted so much that monks were essentially writing only for other monks.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, ancient Babylon had institutionalized childhood education for complex literary works. Medieval Europe treated literacy as a specialized craft. So much for exponential growth.
If I recall, there are hundreds of thousands of untranslated cuneiform texts—and less than 10% have been translated.
I wish there was a resource that tracked all the untranslated classical texts. For instance, only about 10% of Neo-Latin texts have been translated. It seems to me that the products of the renaissance ought to be a part of the training corpus of AGI.
Fascinating. I should have studied Assyriology, few areas are as impressive imo. Maybe I still can, even at LMU. Although I don't believe it's possible alongside a regular job.
"Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered"
Oh great, just in time for the passage of an interstellar object and the Dalai Lama's reincarnation day.
"missing for a millennium" - according to both the article and the journal piece, the most recent of these fragments is nearly two millennia old.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iraq/article/literar...
The Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.