Historical Artifacts

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Just a community for everyone to share artifacts, reconstructions, or replicas for the historically-inclined to admire!

Generally, an artifact should be 100+ years old, but this is a flexible requirement if you find something rare and suitably linked to an era of history, not a strict rule. Anything over 100 is fair game regardless of rarity.

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Illustrations of the past should go to [email protected]

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Sumerian -> Akkadian Dictionary (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Triangular stylus go brrrrr

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[–] lemerchand 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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".

[–] lemerchand 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

And now I wonder if it was sight read? Considering how sensitive our fingertips are, maybe reading it like braille would've made sense...