Ancient Texts Preservation
Comments focus on the value of ancient documents like cuneiform clay tablets, Herculaneum scrolls, and other historical writings for understanding past civilizations, their preservation challenges, lost knowledge, and modern AI efforts to decipher them.
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aren't searchable, plaintext copies of ancient documents worthwhile? what about learning materials?
BTW for about archeology, this remembers me ancient writings on birch bark.They was not time-prone, so mostly just disappear. And now people ask, are you sure, existed such civilization?How it is possible, we know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism but no journals, no blogs of ancient people, who done such smart things?
disappointed this didn't link to some analysis of clay tablets
Hard disagree when it comes to any ancient text. For example, many of the oldest cuneiform tablets are simply accounting and receipts. They give a direct insight into what was considered valuable enough to keep track of back then. Likewise, marginalia and even doodles tell us a great deal about what some individuals were thinking about.This is as interesting to me as any form of literature.
From my own limited experience, ancient documents tended to be very elliptical; when everything had to be copied out by hand the reader was expected to do a little more work to understand what documents meant. So this tablet may have been the equivalent of notes accompanying a lecture: "As you can see from the triangles on this diagram..."
A counterargument and something to ponder: we may have lost a huge amount of history, if centuries ago people always destroyed their stone tablets/parchments/etc. thoroughly after using them.
For cuneiform see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446876 on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446289
Maybe decoding Herculaneum scrolls? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum_papyri#Virtual_unr...
What is objectionable is that you are just making shit up. Calling it "common sense" does not help.It is a fact that actually-ancient manuscripts are vanishingly scarce; almost everything you cite on bookshelves today is from copies of copies of copies. And, extended text has already been extracted from charred scrolls from that very site, albeit destructively. So, what you insist is impossible has already been done. The goal is to do it better. You could have found out all this you
Re that scrollhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-21-year-old-u...It seems to me like it really appropriate background...