“The fakes created during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tell us another story, one of the rediscovery of the ancient Near East within the Orientalism movement. This fascination about the Orient and the past led certain individuals to create some fantastic stories and theories, such as those published by the writer Zecharia Stichin (1920–2010) who took the mythological battles of gods related in the authentic Babylonian Epic of Creation to be real astronomic phenomena.”
Michel, C. 2020. Cuneiform Fakes: A Long History from Antiquity to the Present Day. In: Michel, C. and Friedrich, M. ed. Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 25-60. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110714333-002
“The fakes created during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tell us another story, one of the rediscovery of the ancient Near East within the Orientalism movement. This fascination about the Orient and the past led certain individuals to create some fantastic stories and theories, such as those published by the writer Zecharia Stichin (1920–2010) who took the mythological battles of gods related in the authentic Babylonian Epic of Creation to be real astronomic phenomena.”
Michel, C. 2020. Cuneiform Fakes: A Long History from Antiquity to the Present Day. In: Michel, C. and Friedrich, M. ed. Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 25-60. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110714333-002
"After a thorough examination, we may conclude that the item’s amateurish preparation and local origin are suggestive of a scribal exercise. The use of an available mould that was not suitable for a tablet, the child’s fingerprint on the reverse and the corrected mistakes in the script all point to an inexperienced scribe."
“After a thorough examination, we may conclude that the item’s amateurish preparation and local origin are suggestive of a scribal exercise. The use of an available mould that was not suitable for a tablet, the child’s fingerprint on the reverse and the corrected mistakes in the script all point to an inexperienced scribe.”
Tomorrow (19 December, 16:15 CET) in the Digital Classicist Seminar Berlin at @BBAW:
G. R. Smidt, E. Lefever, K. De Graef, K. K. T. Chandrasekar, L. Foket (Universität Gent) speak on “MIND THE GAP! Advancing #Cuneiform Studies through Digital Collaboration”
From the abstract: “The CUNE-IIIF-ORM project is centred around cooperation. Our goals are to disseminate, increase and augment the corpus of Old Babylonian (c. 2000-1600 BCE) Akkadian texts.”
More info (location and URL for Zoom): https://digiclass.bbaw.de/seminar.html@antiquidons
Ancient Knowledge Networks: A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia
Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies as well as in writings. It explores the forms knowledge takes and the meanings it accrues, and how these meanings are shaped by the peoples who use it.
"Our approach consists of a pipeline with two components: a sign detector and a wedge detector. The sign detector uses a RepPoints model with a ResNet18 backbone to locate individual cuneiform characters in the tablet segment image. The signs are then cropped based on the sign locations and fed into the wedge detector. The wedge detector is based on the idea of Point RCNN approach. It uses a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and RoI Align to predict the positions and classes of the wedges. The method is evaluated using different hyperparameters, and post-processing techniques such as Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) are applied for refinement."
"Personal names provide fascinating testimony to Babylonia's multi-ethnic society. This volume offers a practical introduction to the repertoire of personal names recorded in cuneiform texts from Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. In this period, individuals moved freely as well as involuntarily across the ancient Middle East, leaving traces of their presence in the archives of institutions and private persons in southern Mesopotamia."
"Personal names provide fascinating testimony to Babylonia's multi-ethnic society. This volume offers a practical introduction to the repertoire of personal names recorded in cuneiform texts from Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. In this period, individuals moved freely as well as involuntarily across the ancient Middle East, leaving traces of their presence in the archives of institutions and private persons in southern Mesopotamia."