Digitizing cuneiform

are In a windowless office at UCLA's Kinsey Hall, professor Robert Englund is translating clay markings into bytes, turning one of the oldest forms of communication into one of the newest.

Englund and a few graduate students in the Department of Assyriology have undertaken an ambitious task: archiving the contents of cuneiform tablets scattered throughout the world. With the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, they are trying to create a centralized inventory of cuneiform for scholars, and — in the wake of the looting in Iraq — a tool for investigators.

Cuneiform is wedge-shaped writing made by pressing the tip of a reed into wet clay. It was used in various forms from about 3,200 BC to the Christian era to write in many of the major languages of the Near East. Englund's project (on the Web at http://cdli.ucla.edu) currently archives images of 70,000 cuneiform texts, out of a worldwide cache of 1.5 million.

Posted by David on June 3, 2003 1:51 PM