It looks like Lemmy wasn’t happy with the hi-res version, but if you follow the link to wikipedia, zooming in on the stylus marks is very cool.
I hope it can translate “My hovercraft is full of eels”
“Your copper is of poor quality” = “Please fondle my buttocks”
It’s crazy to think scribes would have still been learning Sumerian at the time; the wiki page says it was found around mid 1st century BC and at this point the Assyrians and Babylonians had shifted to almost all Akkadian and Aramaic (iirc) and Sumerian would have been a rare thing to study (Ashurbanipal had bragged about having studied the language as if it was a rarity for anything other than perhaps royal priests) but maybe it was still being used in the South even that late?
Thanks for sharing, very cool!
Edit: If it matters, I may have misattributed the linguistic boasting to Ashurbanipal; in hindsight I think it was his father Esarhaddon…I feel like I recall reading that he may have been educated in priestly duties and letters because he wasn’t expected to have succeeded his father Sennacherib.
I think it’s fascinating as a written language - zooming in you can see so many . . not sure what the technical term is for them, but additional lines in a word that must indicate something - like making an entire written symbolic language out of the letter “D”.
Yea! I’ve skimmed through a cuneiform dictionary and saw so many words that made me wonder how anyone could possibly sight-read it without accidentally mistaking things haha.
And now I wonder if it was sight read? Considering how sensitive our fingertips are, maybe reading it like braille would’ve made sense…
