Archaeologists discover previously unknown language from ancient tablet
Archaeologists discover previously unknown language from ancient tablet
The recently discovered language remains largely incomprehensible, but researchers said it belongs to the Indo-European family.
I was wondering why the researchers hadn't released any pictures of this newly discovered language, but on careful re-reading I realise it was transcribed in cunieform... so to me it would be totally indistinguishable from any other Hittite tablet.
44Yeah sure fuck it. Let's just read the ancient mystery tablet and see what happens. I'm willing to roll those dice right now.
35Turns out it’s Java
31Back when they didn't have virtual machines so they had to hand-transpile it into Fortran and encode that onto punch slabs to put in their stone computers
5Except that it was so long ago that they were still using Onetran.
8
"My cousin Nanni in Akkadia warned me not to buy copper from you, but I foolishly did not heed his warning..."
29Archeology never ceases to amaze me.
12I will always regret not going for an archaeology degree in college.
4No you won't. As was explained by an actual archaeologist, the domain is likened to a ponzi scheme where you spend more time trying to convince investors to finance your digging through the mud than actually finding anything worth investing in. You will give everything you have and more to the lowest bidder, because all the rich people you'd look to invest are already taken by professors much older and much more experienced than you are. Dirty deeds are abound and everywhere you go there will be no escape from smuggling, money laundering or corporate interests clashing with your own. The archaeology profession is synonymous with nepotism and corruption because all the purists are already buried deep next to the relics they so wished to uncover.
16
This is the best summary I could come up with:
According to the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Germany, a public research university, the lost language belongs to the Indo-European family, which includes hundreds of related tongues that are all thought to share a single prehistoric ancestor.
The latest Indo-European language to be identified was discovered thanks to a ritual text inscribed on a tablet at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Boğazköy-Hattusha in Turkey's northern Çorum province.
The Hittite ritual text refers to the lost tongue as the language of the land of Kalašma, an area that likely corresponds to where the towns of Bolu or Gerede in northern Turkey are located today.
"The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages," Daniel Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, said in a press release.
However, professor Elisabeth Rieken with the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, a specialist in Anatolian languages, has confirmed that the Kalasmaic tongue belongs to the Indo-European family, according to Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.
In a study published in the journal Transactions of the Philological Society, a team of scientists describe how they partially deciphered the "unknown" Kushan script, an ancient writing system that was once in use in parts of Central Asia between around 200 B.C.
The original article contains 507 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 59%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
12Not 200 BC-- that date is for an unrelated language.
Hittittes were around from like 1600-1200 BC, so a language lost to them is probably at least like 1500 BC.
3
I had a thought of some archaeologists dusting off a first-gen ipad and peering at it through a microscope
11The message was translated 'what r u up to rn? I wanna double park on that booty baby'
8Hey, who swapped my Fertility Ceremony tablet with my Funerary Rites tablet!?
5tlhIngan Hol vIghaj
2