[Air-l] ANCIENT WRITING SYSTEM GETS INTERNET UPDATE

[George(s) Lessard]

ANCIENT WRITING SYSTEM GETS INTERNET UPDATE
A number of universities have begun to transfer hundreds of examples of
the 5,200-year-old cuneiform writing system to the World Wide Web. 
Cuneiform was used from 3200 B.C. to A.D. 75 to record everything from tax
receipts to the legends, science and religion of the ancient world. 
Hundreds of thousands of tablets written in cuneiform are in museums
around the world. Project leads believe that bringing these tablets online
in dictionary, photographic, and 3D forms will be of tremendous value to
researchers. The Birmingham University Digital Forensic Project is
creating a Web-based cuneiform catalog covering signs made from 3000 B.C.
to 323 B.C.  In the Digital Hammurabi Project at Johns Hopkins University
they are collecting three-dimensional images of tablets from 2000 B.C.
onward.  Johns Hopkins Assyriologist Jerrold Cooper said, "The beauty of
this is that with fast and cheap 3-D scanning, we can practically put the
tablet in your hands on your desktop." Other online projects are based at
UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania. [SOURCE: USA Today, AUTHOR: Dan
Vergano] (http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/2002/05/21/cuneiform.htm)

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