Register for free. FutureLearn offers courses in many different subjects such as. This article is from the free online. Our purpose is to transform access to education. Register to receive updates. Visit the source of this article and learn more! Before You Go! Why Not See all FutureLearn courses. Konstantopoulos cautions students that the understanding and interpretation of Sumerian is still evolving, and for that reason, so are translations.
Once you have made headway with Sumerian fundamentals, there are some more detailed grammars that will become indispensable. Konstantopoulos recommends the following linguistics-focused resources for such students: P. C36 ], edited by R. Woodward; M. T46 ]; and B. Another grammar that students may find useful as their Sumerian skills mature is D.
E38 ]. For morphology specifically, Konstantopoulos brings our attention to G. A75 M67 ; ebook available], edited by A. The study of a language cannot be divorced from its historical and cultural context. S ; ebook available] contains over thirty chapters on material remains, systems of government, daily life, and neighboring societies among other topics.
Finkel and J. Additional context on the materiality of Sumerian and its art historical context can be found from the early chapters in Z. B16 ]. But perhaps the best introduction at this point to the tablets themselves through the CDLI which places artifact images and their associated text together in an open-access platform. Lastly, it should be mentioned that the complete focus in learning cuneiform languages is on reading and not on writing texts.
The language was of course inscribed into clay tablets using a reed stylus and, while working with clay has become a common enough activity in the Sumerian classroom, there is a certain artifice to reproducing signs with pen and paper. The site Cuneify Plus can help turn transliterated forms into cuneiform unicode.
But if you truly are committed to practice writing out signs, one book stands out as an attempt to overcome the artifice—D.
Few of us will ever cradle a 5,year-old tablet in our palm. It was built in Nineveh by Ashurbanipal, a powerful and book-loving Assyrian king. Some of the surviving tablets from his library are displayed at the British Museum as part of a special exhibition on Ashurbanipal. Although blackened and hardened by fire when Nineveh was sacked in BC, the text they carry can still be read. New imaging techniques are making the job of working with such ancient, often damaged texts easier.
With highly detailed images, it is possible to pick out marks that may be too obscure to see with a human eye. Dahl and his colleagues have been digitising tablets and seals stored in collections in Teheran, Paris and Oxford for a project known as the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. Without sprawling digital resources like this, training machines to do translation would not even be possible. New imaging techniques, combined with advanced machine vision tools, are helping to transform efforts to decipher ancient languages like Proto-Elamite Credit: British Museum.
Digitisation is also helping researchers to piece together links between texts scattered in collections around the world. Dahl, along with researchers at the University of Southampton and the University of Paris-Nanterre, has digitised 3D images of about 2, stone seals from Mesopotamia. In a pilot project , they then used AI algorithms to examine a group of six tablets and identify matching seal impressions found elsewhere in the world. The algorithm correctly selected a tablet that is currently stored in Italy , and another that is stored in the United States ; both had been stamped by the same seal.
Matching seals and impressions has been notoriously difficult in the past, as many are stored thousands of miles apart. Dahl estimates that all seals could be digitised within about five years, which would then make it possible to trace other patterns. There is some indication, for example, that certain types of stone were favoured by women. British Museum 21 January Cuneiform code chart from cuneiform by Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor.
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