pretty cool

forgot to put this up somewhere so here you go. visualize your favorite zlib stream! lynn.github.io/flateview/

Even Neo-Babylonian Uruk had that one person feeding stray cats.

did you know? teleost fish maintain neutral buoyancy with their swim bladder, which they pump with gas as they descend into depths. specifically, they can pump it with hyperbaric oxygen at partial pressures of *several hundred atmospheres*

The catt was lockt in the chamber, and kept a great mewing, and leapt upon the bed, which made me I could not sleep a great while.

The draft minutes of Unicode Technical Committee Meeting #184 (recorded by yours truly) have been posted: www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/251...

SAUVONS LE PALAIS DE LA DÉCOUVERTE www.change.org/p/sauvons-le... (Avis personnel : des musées comme le Grand Palais, il y en a plein à Paris. Il n'y a qu'un Palais de la Découverte.)

My reconstruction and identification of a partially-preserved Tangut character in a unique fragment of the Homophones text held at the British Library www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n53...

In addition to the excellent subject matter 😸 I can so relate to this feeling of there being so many different scripts and delightful sets of type and wanting to make it work to just pack them all in there. #DHmakes

The draft minutes of Unicode Technical Committee Meeting #183 (recorded by yours truly) have just been posted: www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/250...

Dear friends and colleagues, the academic program of the 70th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (Prague, July 7-11) is now available online at rai70.ff.cuni.cz/program.php Registration to attend is still open! #70RAIPrague #Assyriology @FF_CUNI @Orientalniustav @iaassyriology.bsky.social

Monumental three-volume Handbook of Epigraphic Cultures to be published by De Gruyter, early next year hopefully. Open Access eBook! Includes chapters on Khitan and Tangut epigraphy.

OUUUUAAAAAIS

...and clouds in the sky #NASA's #Mars rover #Curiosity Sol 4480: Right Navigation Camera mars.nasa.gov/raw_images/1... NASA / JPL-Caltech /j. Roger

Spanish mesquin > Arabic miskīn > Akkadian muškēnu (𒈦𒂗𒆕). An impoverished person, destitute, or state dependent. From the Code of Hammurabi (~1750 BCE): "If he has blinded the eye or broken the bone of a muškēnu, he shall pay 1 mina of silver."

while “cider” comes (via Greek, via Latin, via French) from Hebrew שֵׁכָר, the Hebrew word has a cognate in Akkadian šikarum

Another fun Akkadian word that lives on: sofa Akkadian ṣuppu, "thick, compacted (of textiles)" > Aramaic ṣippā/ṣuppā, "carded wool" > Arabic, Turkish "ṣuffa" > sofa

Shocked to learn that French niquer 'to fuck' was borrowed from (Algerian) #Arabic. The root n-y-k is of a venerable, #Proto-Semitic age, with cognates including #Akkadian niākum.

Omg Egyptian “get some” and Arabic “get some” are the same?!

Ok, since several people have expressed surprise that I used the Attic dialect form of the word, “θάλαττα” and not “θάλασσα”, serious question: ‣ How come is it that this word, one of the most widely recognized words in the Greek language, is so in its non-Attic form “θάλασσα”?

If it looks like there are two different fonts on this clay tablet from ancient Babylon, that’s because there are. In December of 603 BCE, a young scribe named Balāṭa made a faithful copy of a far more ancient inscription of Sîn-Kashid who had ruled Uruk over 1,000 years earlier.

𒆠𒄿 𒇽𒈬𒊻𒊏𒀀𒀀 𒀠𒆠

For #EpigraphyTuesday the story of the famous bilingual Khitan-Chinese "Record of the Journey of the Younger Brother of the Emperor of the Great Jin" 大金皇弟都統經略郎君行記 which is engraved on the originally blank face of the Wordless Stele 無字碑 for Empress Wu Zetian at the Qianling Mausoleum in Shaanxi. 1/7

ME: sigh this acronym could have been a Sumerogram

For anyone wondering, some possible dog names have survived from cuneiform sources. On tiny dog figurines found buried under a palace in Nineveh, Iraq are inscriptions that seem to be names. dan rigiššu “loud is his bark” munaššiku gārîšu “biter of his foe” mušēṣi lemnūti “expeller of evil”

The draft minutes of Unicode Technical Committee Meeting #182 (recorded by yours truly) have just been posted: www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/250...

Fieldwork tip: if, in the course of a long elicitation session, your consultant translates "black pepper" as "may it get into your eyes", it may be time for a break. (from Barth's 1850 vocabulary of Emghedesie. My reconstruction: nda a-hur ni-n moo-yo if 3SG-enter 2SG-GEN eye-PL)

Life goals

Yes, we should. #math

Reading about photolithography for electronics. "A large (10 µm) box"

AAAAA - andouillette

Transliterating Japanese like an Assyriologist: 🤨 すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、かつ、尊厳と権利とについて平等である。 su-be-te-no REN.JIAN-wá, SHENG-ma-re-na-ga-ra-ni ši-te ZI.YOU-de a-ri, ka-tsu, ZUN.YAN-to QUAN.LI-to-ni tsu-i-te PING.DENG-de a-ru. 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.'

En prenant ma douche je me suis demandé ce qu'on pouvait mettre comme hypothèse supplémentaire sympa pour qu'une fonction qui vérifie ∀x, f(x+1)=2f(x) soit forcément 2^x et, ce qui montre que l'âge c'est terrible, je n'ai pas trouvé.

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Assyriologist: Du[ring] grad sch[ool] I [took?] a position ... [13 lines illegible] ... now.

Wish you could enjoy watching the Poor Man of Nippur in its original language of Akkadian? You can! The Assyriology community at the University of Cambridge completed this project a few years back and it is a certified classic: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxYo...

Someone, please, find me an article I can write where I can include this! I NEED to include this in something!

I saw someone on Reddit ask if Ur had street names. Yes, Ur had street names and it wasn't the only city to have them. Having street names was essential for economic and legal documentation, ritual instruction, and civic recognition.

This proposed draft technical standard by my colleague @macchiato.com addresses long-standing interoperability issues with linkifying plain text. While discussing the draft, we kept running into them: in email the link was to ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/, and here アルベルト is needlessly escaped to %E3%82%…

Those from Assyriology Twitter who enjoyed Iris Kamil’s Akkadian letter threads may want to subscribe to her blog, where she has started posting these again: iriskamil.com/2024/11/24/t...

Those from Assyriology Twitter who enjoyed Iris Kamil’s Akkadian letter threads may want to subscribe to her blog, where she has started posting these again: iriskamil.com/2024/11/24/t...

Happy Meetings Cancelled Day to everyone not in the US 🎉

now THIS is my kind of Python book.

Ea-nāṣir is the recipient of the world’s oldest complaint letter. He’s reportedly the worst businessman of the 18th century, a mediocre conman whose actions should have him put out of business. Is this fair? Here’s a thread on the most up-to-date research on this captivating figure.

A few more possible math mistakes from 4,000 years ago to remind us that we all struggled to learn stuff at one point or another. Here, a student is multiplying numbers by themselves (squaring calculation) but put a 7 instead of a 5 in part of the answer cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/25...

I've made one of these for Assyriologists ! Please reach out if you want to be added. -- J'ai fait un starter pack d'assyriologues, faites signe pour y être ajouté•es ! go.bsky.app/DrZS5R7

𒌨𒂠𒊑​𒋗​𒋼𒁀𒀊 𒈬𒌦𒍪 𒂷𒂷​𒉡𒌒𒍪𒀀𒀭

The draft minutes of Unicode Technical Committee Meeting #181 (recorded by yours truly) have just been posted: www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/242....

I just found some photos from the Philae landing. Only time to post one at the moment, but it's a good one. I love covering European space events in person mostly because space events are awesome, but European ones are specifically awesome because there is good food and wine.