My colleagues and I wrote a programming language (really just a python wrapper on unicode characters) in cuneiform. The novelty was that we tried as much as possible to use actual mathematical concepts from 3rd (and early 2nd) millennium BCE Mesopotamia. We published it in Sigbovik 2024 (https://www.sigbovik.org/2024/proceedings.pdf) as well as a full neural net implementation using the language.
This article makes wildly erroneous claims about a genuinely very interesting ancient object. I've worked a bit on this (PhD in Babylonian Astronomy/Astrology) and published articles talking about it. It's a fascinating object but more so as a product of scholarly thinking about the heavens rather than actual observations. Even if it did record observations they would date to the Neo-Assyrian period (when/where the object was found) not to an even more ancient past.
Notably the article linked here doesn't even show the object! It only reproduces images of badly made replicas.
Yeah, soon after I posted this it became clear it's nonsense, a few people in the thread have referred to studies that trees underneath the landslide have been carbon dated to 9400BP, while the book this article's based on claims 5500BP for an "impact"
I mainly posted this because I was beguiled by the images of the disk. I hadn't seen it before, so even these shoddy images were impressive, with the circular form, radially arranged characters and lines looking both ancient and technical. Would you recommend a source for some proper information on it? I'm curious about what it says. Googling I keep coming up with rehashings of this meteor story from websites with "Atlantis" in their names and suchlike.
The tablet has been translated for the better part of a century. The problem is that many of the popular depictions of it don't give it's museum number or any other (correct) identifying information, often erroneously referring to it as a "Sumerian" object.
If you search for the museum number K. 8538 you'll find quite a bit (some still bad). That said, this article is wildly off-base.
I think you might be conflating two camps of academics. There have been folks for a while now who were vehemently against online education, and there are also those pushing digital pedagogy forward. The former were stuck in a rut when classes moved online this spring, and the latter were there to pick up the slack and start organizing workshops and trying to make all university teaching better online.
I'm really curious about how you came to the conclusion that Turkey doesn't allow digs (not criticizing!). Like, I'm just wondering where the failure in PR was for archaeologists working in Turkey that it wasn't self-evident.
Perhaps I'm biased (certainly) but Turkey often seems to be in the news for spectacular finds from archaeological digs across the country (focused mostly in the west though). I worked on a site in the SE for seven years, and there was a ton of activity every year many foreign but also Turkish digs working in every province.
reply