Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 Ketara wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:

I have commented on most of those things, though I don't recall talking about aquatic biology. But then so do you, so do others on Dakka. You dont lay this at them. I have had conversations with the same people on many of the above subjects. Iron Captain included.

The difference between yourself and virtually every other poster on this board from my observation; is the level of absolute certainty with which you venture reasonably definitive statements and opinions on subjects with comparatively little knowledge.

This is how a theorist works, I dont use certainties, just possibilities with confidence. Where certainty come into it is refusing for an idea to be handwaved away, rather than insisting it is correct. Similar but subtly different.

 Ketara wrote:

If you want a specific example, I'd indicate back to the thread on Edwardian naval wargaming. Where you accused me of being 'blind' to the fact that wargames 'were considered relevant to real strategic thinking' before proceeding to vacillate into how they were 'linked to staff colleges'. But you knew none of the major writers/researchers in the field of Edwardian British naval strategy when named, and were genuinely clueless that there was no naval general staff at that point. In other words, you took something you'd vaguely read somewhere at some point and packaged it up with your 'amateur free thinker' skills to speculate far beyond your knowledge or competence in a mildly offensive fashion.

Actually your blindness was in the assumption that the Edwardian Naval wargame was the de facto oldest. And when I challenged that by looking at Sebatain De Vauban's models of siegecraft, it was challenged by comments on whether or not I knew of any particular obscure Edwarding naval theorist.
What you said was, 'if you dont know the buzzwords like I do, you are not educated in the field like I am'.
I didnt know the buzzwords, but then I didn't need to, it wasn't relevant to the validity of my commentary, because the topic was about the oldest wargame, not the oldest wargame Ketara found, and I referred back to De Vauban's models on siegecraft from several centuries earlier. It was a logical non-sequitor to dismiss evidence of a possible older game by checking my knowledge on an unrelated subject.

Did you check up on De Vauban like I recommended, or were you satisfied that you had found the words oldest wargame and decided not to look any further?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sébastien_Le_Prestre_de_Vauban

 Ketara wrote:

Given that you proudly state ' I don't need to be an expert in any subject to have insight' though, I'm not hopeful of any improved quality in your post content as a result of self-awareness.

Your error here is in assuming that quality comes from accreditation and not from input.
Its the same bugbear, the assumption that if you are not from our club you have nothing important to add to the discussion.

Interesting that you didn't even attempt to challenge me on my amateur historical or science contributions. You see I passed on my theories to experts in the field who are far better suited than I do handling them. It's not the Orlanth show, and I am not deluded enough to think it is; but I cant be of no value if universities choose to follow up my concepts.

Edit : Ketara removed his previous post while I was typing this. So OK we have a truce, and I toned it down a bit.

Actually, given the above, I wont bother comihg back to deal with the previous reply to me fully. The Dunning-Kruger levels and needless hostility are just too farcical.

A final statement on this silly argument Orlanth has insisted on having, then. My position throughout has been 'this would be great but is not currently feasible because of limited resources'. I haven't even renotely suggested that an opinion be disregarded, but have simply stated, politely until now, why laser scanning every inscribed artefact is not realistic, and why current approaches are sufficient for our purposes and appropriate to our available levels of technology.

Eventually it might become financially viable, or military technologies may become both available and affordable - as has happened several times in archaeology's history. I work directly with two of the leaders in utilising declassified CORONA imagery, for instance. Some out the box thinking, I suppose. A friend managed to get a prototype Mars Rover for geophysics. As it happens, some projects have had intelligence experts from some of the most respected national security agencies on the planet in on things. Some people laser scan tablets. Amazingly, you're not the first person to suggest we do it to everything with text on it. As I've said repeatedly, however, most of what can be done with textual artefacts with laser scanning at current levels of technology can be done with photography-based techniques. It would be great to do it anyway to have them on hand for the future, but you need to get funding, and nobody in the humanities funds a project on the basis that one day it will be useful. So whilst a lovely idea, it is not viable at the moment.

The arrogance of assuming that you have potentially paradigm-shifting insights that no one in a massive discipline has had is quite remarkable when you display absolutely no familiarity with how academic research or funding works. We're not simply failing to do things because no one has thought to or because no one has thought of framing a funding application as relevant to other issues - literally every funding application guide specifically demands a lengthy explanation of why and how the project will contribute to research beyond the field, provide value to and engage the public, and allow for extensive outreach. You're not suggesting something ingenuous, you're positing something every lowly-research student has to do to get onto a programme.

So, to shift the topic back to the Late Bronze Age..... I am interested in learning more about the supposed "Sea Peoples" of the period to see what has been put together about them as a group. Any books on this topic you would recommend for a layman?

nfe wrote:
Actually, given the above, I wont bother comihg back to deal with the previous reply to me fully. The Dunning-Kruger levels and needless hostility are just too farcical.

Dont troll, post an arguement.

nfe wrote:

A final statement on this silly argument Orlanth has insisted on having, then.

I gave a fair hypothesis this is not how one should respond, especially with the comments below.

nfe wrote:

My position throughout has been 'this would be great but is not currently feasible because of limited resources'..

There are ways to gain said resources.

nfe wrote:

I haven't even renotely suggested that an opinion be disregarded,

Yes you have. Its either viable idea you don't think the time is right for, or its Dunning-Kruger. Choose.
You cant accuse people of scaling Mt Stupid if you consider the idea is not to be disregarded.

nfe wrote:

but have simply stated, politely until now, why laser scanning every inscribed artefact is not realistic, and why current approaches are sufficient for our purposes and appropriate to our available levels of technology.

Actually you haven't. You gave a preference against laser scanning, but didn't explain why, other than its not what you are used to, which is strictly for hands on analogue work. You even admitted that it has superior quality. You have now admitted it has its proponents.

nfe wrote:

Eventually it might become financially viable, or military technologies may become both available and affordable - as has happened several times in archaeology's history. I work directly with two of the leaders in utilising declassified CORONA imagery, for instance. Some out the box thinking, I suppose. A friend managed to get a prototype Mars Rover for geophysics. As it happens, some projects have had intelligence experts from some of the most respected national security agencies on the planet in on things.

Good so you can accept that there are roads of access for military technology into academic study. Bet that Mars Rover is worth more than 35K.
A fast computer for codebreaking isn't so stupid then isn't it. * Neither is getting access to codebreakers. Government access might have results, unless the Mars Rovers are now available in ASDA.

nfe wrote:

Some people laser scan tablets. Amazingly, you're not the first person to suggest we do it to everything with text on it. As I've said repeatedly, however, most of what can be done with textual artefacts with laser scanning at current levels of technology can be done with photography-based techniques.

So I am onto the right idea, from the point of view of some of your colleagues. Perhaps I am not far off after all.

nfe wrote:

It would be great to do it anyway to have them on hand for the future, but you need to get funding, and nobody in the humanities funds a project on the basis that one day it will be useful. So whilst a lovely idea, it is not viable at the moment.

It's a lovely idea right. How patronising, oh whata lovely idea, but so Dunning-Kruger.

As laser scanning viable and is being done now, how about positing its advantages. Instead of working with analogue by hand if you move to laser scanning you can work entirely digitally and also disseminate the information between researchers more easily.
Its not just the future its now. What you are saying is indistinguishable from refusing to move to disk because tape is what you are used to. Sooner or later the change will come, make it sooner and not have to do the work twice.

Is all this a struggle to prevent obsolescence of your personal skillset? You described to some length your analogue photogrammetry skills, and the work you do with them. It could explain why you lashed out when digitising was propositioned.

nfe wrote:

The arrogance of assuming that you have potentially paradigm-shifting insights that no one in a massive discipline has had is quite remarkable when you display absolutely no familiarity with how academic research or funding works.

You contradict yourself. I already knew that one could get rare and expensive things from the government with the right excuse. You proved that by admitting what colleagues of yours have managed to get which includes SigInt gear.
Yet somehow that translates into a lack of understanding of academic funding. I have been consistent in my logical flow, I suggest you do the same.

There is no funding, no funding, no funding, but a Mars rover, but no funding, no funding, no funding, but cutting edge military imaging hardware/software.

nfe wrote:

We're not simply failing to do things because no one has thought to or because no one has thought of framing a funding application as relevant to other issues - literally every funding application guide specifically demands a lengthy explanation of why and how the project will contribute to research beyond the field, provide value to and engage the public, and allow for extensive outreach.

I do understand funding applications. I worked for a homeless charity that got successful lottery funding. Same principles apply. I wasn't the one who made the application, that was a former banker who volunteered on the same project, but I learned from him. He spent a lot of time on it getting it just right, very serious work went into that, over three months for a 20 page document, and yes he had past expertise on this, from the other side I think, which he used with care, we were lucky to have him on the team.

nfe wrote:

You're not suggesting something ingenuous, you're positing something every lowly-research student has to do to get onto a programme.

So that's not Mt Stupid either, if I am positing what those in your field also do, but on my own and without prompting; how the feth is that Dunning-Kruger?

You could have said something on the lines of: several people in the field have posited this idea before Orlanth but I don't like it for these reasons.... rather than try and convince everyone that it is just a fringe whackjob idea.

Also for the record Dunning-Kruger doesn't easily apply to cross field analytics, a broad shallow knowledge base can reveal out of the box solutions. Insight can be gleaned from people with popular science levels of involvement and a bit of imagination. Seen this pay off many times. Good common examples of this are well written hard science fiction, you don't need to be a physics god to write plausible hard SF and in doing so provide deep insight into future trends in avenues where formal experience is more limited. Arthur C Clarke was not a cutting edge rocket scientist, but he inspired many who were.


* Computer technology is still growing exponentially. This means that hardware is being replaced as certain agencies like/need to have the latest generation of tech. Usually the old stuff is destroyed, but there are perhaps options for a worth academic cause. Remember also that while advanced computers are expensive the common way to make a data cruncher is by linking GPU's as converted CPU's. This requires normal commercial computer architecture rather than more expensive server architecture. This will still be expensive, but not necessarily beyond what academicians could get from a wealthy donor or corporate sponsor. That is assuming you don't get hands off access to last years model of codebreaker for free from the spooks.

You tell people not to troll, and then you go quote a bunch of single sentences in a giant wall and respond to each of them with the same mix brand of red-herrings, goal post moving, and straw men that you always use.

I stopped keeping track of how many sharks you managed to jump ages ago, but I'm glad to see there's some consistency in the world.

Uh... guys? Shall we keep this civil and academic? This was a great thread until you started to fight. You have both made your respective points.
Shall we go back to talking about the Bronze Age and related topics?

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

I see. But the thing is, all of this has already been done. By hand. Because we do not have a ten thousand clay tablets. The entire corpus of known Linear A texts for example fits on a few sheets of paper. And for many other undeciphered languages we have even less to go on..

If its done by hand it isnt done. People cannot cross reference every symbol and categorise it in relation to other surrounding symbols, it needs a computer.

As for the volume of data:

http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/departments/middle_east/facilities_and_services/study_room/studying_cuneiform_tablets.aspx

The British Museum claims to have 130,000 texts. So I don't know where you get the idea of a few sheets of paper.
Looking at the breakdown there are tens of thousands of fragments from some cultures. These are perhaps large enough sample groups for a volume pattern test. Though you will need to know some seed information about where the tablets were found so that you can begin to guess as to the contents of the documentation.

That is not Linear A though. The languages for which we have large collections are also the ones which we have been able to translate already.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

We can tell whether some character is a number or a vowel (especially with Linear A, since Linear B which uses the same characters has been deciphered) with a fair degree of accuracy. For Linear A we can even spell out entire words and texts. Problem is those words are unintelligible because they are in an unknown language not closely related to any known language (Minoan is basically the Basque or the Hungarian of the Bronze Age I guess). The only thing we can somewhat guess at is place names (which are presumably derived from the Minoan language and therefore related). For example it may be that the Linear A word "Keniso" is the Minoan name for Knossos. But that is as far as we have gotten in the past 50 years, and as far as we are going to get until we find some bilingual text that could give us a starting point at finding out the meaning behind Linear A words. We can also guess which words are meant to be numbers and which are meant to be commodities, but the precise meaning still eludes us.

This makes it a pictoral code without a key, in codebreaking terms. Nothing especially unusual, except for the complete lack of double encryption. Agencies DO break codes like this. I am sure the Russians have a dab hand in it too.

I don't know anything about military code breaking but I assume the difference is that the codes that agencies break are all encode living (and known) languages. I highly doubt the Russian military uses anything but Russian for its messages for example. Using an unknown language in fact does appear to be a highly effective way of making a (nearly) unbreakable code. I googled a bit and the US used obscure Native American languages for its messages for this reason.
A language is a very different sort of code from a military code. A military code or cipher is a substitution. It substitutes the characters or sounds of its message (the plaintext, in codebreaking terms) with different characters or sounds. This means that if you can figure out the logic or the algorithm behind the code or cipher, you can restore the message back to its initial form. A language on the other hand encodes complicated ideas into sounds at different levels (which can then be further encoded into characters). There is no plaintext. There is no logic. There is no algorithm. You can not decode the sounds to the ideas they represent because there exists no way of finding out how a specific sound is related to any idea. Languages are much more complicated than any code or cipher that has ever been broken.
As excited as I get when thinking about using codebreaking techniques for deciphering languages, I just don't see how you can solve an equation with no known variables.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

On a sidenote, I often do exercises like this where you get a text in an unknown language and then have to answer questions about it based on patterns (I even won a prize once in a competition). Sometimes you can even use patterns to translate an entire text even though it is an incredibly obscure language spoken only by some tribe deep in the Amazon forests. That is pretty cool. Thing is, you always need a starting point. To solve the equation you always need at least one known variable. With dead languages like Linear A, there is none. All variables are unknown which makes them completely impossible to solve or 'break'.

So you do this. Cool.
However maybe Ketara will come after you too.

Yeah. It is cool. The university of Leiden organises olympiads for it. I participated in it when I was a school kid since I loved puzzling with languages. I seriously contemplated studying linguistics, but figured that job prospects in that field are even worse than in archaeology. Ketara can come after me any time he wants linguistic puzzles

 Orlanth wrote:
I explained the dilemma earlier. You do need a starting point, your are correct, and to get one you need to make simultaneous breakthroughs because you have no starting point and have a cross match. Examples of how this was done was given in the previous comment.

Now your problem here is with the word impossible. The above problem is far less of an issue than double encryption, which should result in totally random code. But that is NOT unbreakable, just nearly unbreakable.
One advantage you have is with isolating where the tablets come from, similar to adding HumInt to the SigInt in the pattern. So for example if you have something that might be a trade document from a coastal city in asia minor you might look for references for the word for 'tin', because that is where this crucial import material will be arriving. Rural communities might not have that resource on their trade list. If the Egyptians, who we can read report of a saying of the hittites or a phrase they used in their documentation we could ook for that systematically and see if the same symbols in unrelated texts make sense.

Yeah, the starting point is that you need at least a partial translation. You need to have an idea of what at least some of the words mean. Because otherwise you can't look for references to the word tin, since you do not know which of the ~30 words on your trade manifest means tin. Any of them could mean tin, so how you are going to say which one it is? What if it is a port that also frequently gets shipments of copper, grain and wood? How are you going to tell apart the word for tin from the word for grain? Or the words for dog and soup (which is what my example sentences were about)?

 Orlanth wrote:
A lot of this is translating the impossible into the possible via looking for the plausible. If you want an open unclassified example of this look at the history of Bletchley Park. While the early computers are the stars of the show, a lot of the codebreaking involved guessing words based on. So the first code of the day from St Nazaire was likely to be a weather report, because it gave an indicator of weather for central Europe all day. This was not always so, but it was often enough. So cross reference assuming codewords meant 'sunny' or 'storms' etc.

That worked because they knew what the German words for "sunny" or "stormy" are.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Let's take my phrase again for example:

Maj jucha tivoj kajara jamäl.

And add a few more simple ones:

Maj jucha tivoj kajara obitsjimäl.
Jucha tivoj kajara jamita.
Maj jucha ja isakamäl jamidj.
Jucha ja obitsjimu.
Jucha tivoj kajara alisö obitsjimita.

Just from this small sample, you should be able to figure out which words are verbs, nouns and pronouns, and even what the word order of the language is (whether it is subject-object-verb or subject-verb-object etc.).

I personally cant tell one word from another. I am not a linguist. But I take your word for it.

Try it! It is huge fun! You don't need to be a linguist, I am not a linguist either. To give a starting point, "jucha" is a noun and means "soup" (bonus internet points for the person who guesses from which language this word is derived).

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

However, what you will not be able to figure out is what the sentences actually mean. Pattern recognition can only bring you understanding of the structure of a language. To understand what it really means, you need to have at least some translations.

Ok. looking at the above. Assuming it was part of a larger database of text fragments in a lost language. You could try and pattern match likely words depending on context of the document. It is appears to be a stack of poetry from a house. You also have a stack of what appears to be tax records from another part of the dig site. Say you hypothesis one word may mean cows, another may mean soldiers from your analysis of the tax documents. When reading the poetry as cross reference you hypotheses the sentence to say 'the cow owns five soldiers', this doesn't fit, there is a mistake somewhere, 'the soldier owns five cows' however makes sense.
You cant hope to cross reference this, but a computer can, and the larger the dataset the more cross references it can make.

For that you'd (or the computer) first need to already know the words "the", "to own" and "five" though. Do you see the difficulty? You need a starting point somewhere. If absolutely no variable is known, there is no possible starting point.

 Orlanth wrote:
Yes you will need to get a lucky break but when you do it can begin to unravel. Ideally you only need one tablet (preferably double sourced though) to have a list of things in numbered order, on the first year this happened, on the second that happened etc, and a computer might pick up the numerical sequence and thus decode a basic numbers system. You can work out a lot from even rough numbers. If a number is very large it might mean sheep or soldiers or bushels of grain, if a smaller number it might mean chariots or ships.

From the structure you could figure out which words indicate numbers, but how would you ever know which numbers? How do you know that the word "chetirye'' in Russian means 4, and not 5?

 Iron_Captain wrote:

That is not Linear A though. The languages for which we have large collections are also the ones which we have been able to translate already.

Mentioned this earlier. I dont specify. there are more translation jobs than this.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

I don't know anything about military code breaking but I assume the difference is that the codes that agencies break are all encode living (and known) languages. I highly doubt the Russian military uses anything but Russian for its messages for example. Using an unknown language in fact does appear to be a highly effective way of making a (nearly) unbreakable code. I googled a bit and the US used obscure Native American languages for its messages for this reason.

Usually but not necessarily. Codebreakers can work with anything, including pictograms. Most work is text based, but it doesnt end there.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

A language is a very different sort of code from a military code. A military code or cipher is a substitution. It substitutes the characters or sounds of its message (the plaintext, in codebreaking terms) with different characters or sounds. This means that if you can figure out the logic or the algorithm behind the code or cipher, you can restore the message back to its initial form. A language on the other hand encodes complicated ideas into sounds at different levels (which can then be further encoded into characters). There is no plaintext. There is no logic. There is no algorithm. You can not decode the sounds to the ideas they represent because there exists no way of finding out how a specific sound is related to any idea. Languages are much more complicated than any code or cipher that has ever been broken.
As excited as I get when thinking about using codebreaking techniques for deciphering languages, I just don't see how you can solve an equation with no known variables.

Brute force. For example codebreaker computers have to work with double encryption so the resulting pattern doesn't look like language either. Even a simple double encrypted code looks like a solid block of text. There are no words to grasp onto and transfer, you need a holistic approach.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Yeah. It is cool. The university of Leiden organises olympiads for it. I participated in it when I was a school kid since I loved puzzling with languages. I seriously contemplated studying linguistics, but figured that job prospects in that field are even worse than in archaeology. Ketara can come after me any time he wants linguistic puzzles

Not my idea of fun.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Yeah, the starting point is that you need at least a partial translation. You need to have an idea of what at least some of the words mean.

You can work without a partial translation. Its harder but not impossible. As said earlier you cannot make a breakthrough without a seed, and you cant get a seed without cross reference. But you can hold to memory several candidate seeds and then test them to see if a pattern match occurs. This is one of the reasons you need a powerful computer and not do this by hand. It is brute force data crunching. Make or hold several assumptions at once so a text makes sense and pattern match all other known instances of those symbols, if they also make sense you have a match, if they do not you dont. Try again. It has to be an automated process because its a case of testing potential patterns in sequence.
With crude data crunching it might be possible to find patterns on their own by finding relatable symbols. Then you can attempt to work it backwards, for this to work you will need to have clues on the documents original function from where it was found and with what.


To make smart guesses you need instead to have an idea what a text is about, look for commonly recurring patterns in different types of texts. what sort of symbols would occur on a tablet found in a store of tax records. how would it differ from a store found in the remains of what looks like a temple, or someones house.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Because otherwise you can't look for references to the word tin, since you do not know which of the ~30 words on your trade manifest means tin. Any of them could mean tin, so how you are going to say which one it is? What if it is a port that also frequently gets shipments of copper, grain and wood? How are you going to tell apart the word for tin from the word for grain? Or the words for dog and soup (which is what my example sentences were about)?

Ok.
Tin. No you dont know which word it tin, but tin would come up as a manifest in certain areas more often than others. Tin was a very important commodity as it made high quality bronze, the primary metal of the era. Tin came from only a few places, England and central Asia. The fact that the ancient Levant was mining tin in Cornwall is amazing enough.
We now a bit about tin so we can start a pattern search for symbols repeatedly found in some sources. Its not needed in most texts because people normally work with copper or bronze, tin is a component. It would be of great important around coastal ports which likely traded across the Mediterranean than inland. It would be of heightened importance in other specific locations too.
Searches between sets of documents from different locations might highlight which symbols are candidates to mean tin.

Grain. One of the first things you will want to look for are possible number systems, this is relatively easy because pictographic and other early number systems had some form of tally. If one is one line, two might be two lines. Numbers are one of the first patterns to search for.
Grain will be fairly ubiquitous in records, one could expect it to be very common but not immediately identifiable. It might be enough to identify numbers and a batch of which symbols mean products. If however you work out a number system you can begin to allocate guess names to products based on relative values. We know from wrecks what sorts of products were being traded at the time, and can give some guesses as to how many amphorae or pigs of various products are likely.
Grain may have higher numbers attached to it in most documents, its something you want to store a lot of.

Yes these examples are longshots, they all are. But you only need to make one breakthrough before you have a toe into the language. A computer gives you a good chance based cross referencing and analysis gives you a good chance.

I would love to know if any shipwreck tablets are readable. Good chance one is a stock inventory/bill of lading. You could get clues to potential cross matches by what was found on the wreck.
The Black Sea is offering up a lot of ancient wrecks in good condition.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

That worked because they knew what the German words for "sunny" or "stormy" are.

True but that only helps with one level of encryption. You only translate into the German for sunny if you break both halves of the code.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
For that you'd (or the computer) first need to already know the words "the", "to own" and "five" though. Do you see the difficulty? You need a starting point somewhere. If absolutely no variable is known, there is no possible starting point.

Hold that thought, because this is what I have been saying to you all along. You need to have several partial theories that together pattern match.
You make pointers to certain symbols meaning certain words or numbers, you can also have a category rather than a specific value. So you could have the [person] owns [number] [products] as a match without even being sure of the value of 'soldier', 'cows' and 'five'. You don't even have to have 'owns'.
The point is that you can place possible markers of meaning to symbols and then cross reference via the computer to see if it makes unrelated documents make sense. You need to batch your breakthroughs.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

From the structure you could figure out which words indicate numbers, but how would you ever know which numbers? How do you know that the word "chetirye'' in Russian means 4, and not 5?

Symbolic language normally holds a clue as to numerical values. Let us assume this is not so and you don't know the order, you only need to fine one source with items in number order to have a pattern match. Maybe no such source exists, but then again it might. Its another variable for the computer to check.

I am sorry that I am not clearer, this is rather hard to describe. Look at a video on codebreaking to understand more. It essentially boils down to a combination of guesswork based on information clues and brute data crunching to look for patterns that work based on the guesses offered. I think the skills are likely transferable.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

That is not Linear A though. The languages for which we have large collections are also the ones which we have been able to translate already.

Mentioned this earlier. I dont specify. there are more translation jobs than this.

Yeah, but most of it has either already been translated or so far has eluded translation. And those languages that are not translated yet generally have very small corpuses of known text.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

I don't know anything about military code breaking but I assume the difference is that the codes that agencies break are all encode living (and known) languages. I highly doubt the Russian military uses anything but Russian for its messages for example. Using an unknown language in fact does appear to be a highly effective way of making a (nearly) unbreakable code. I googled a bit and the US used obscure Native American languages for its messages for this reason.

Usually but not necessarily. Codebreakers can work with anything, including pictograms. Most work is text based, but it doesnt end there.

Yeah, but all of it is language-based. All codes rely on the assumption that the underlying language is known. Afaik from my quick reading about, never has a code been cracked of which the underlying language was not known.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

A language is a very different sort of code from a military code. A military code or cipher is a substitution. It substitutes the characters or sounds of its message (the plaintext, in codebreaking terms) with different characters or sounds. This means that if you can figure out the logic or the algorithm behind the code or cipher, you can restore the message back to its initial form. A language on the other hand encodes complicated ideas into sounds at different levels (which can then be further encoded into characters). There is no plaintext. There is no logic. There is no algorithm. You can not decode the sounds to the ideas they represent because there exists no way of finding out how a specific sound is related to any idea. Languages are much more complicated than any code or cipher that has ever been broken.
As excited as I get when thinking about using codebreaking techniques for deciphering languages, I just don't see how you can solve an equation with no known variables.

Brute force. For example codebreaker computers have to work with double encryption so the resulting pattern doesn't look like language either. Even a simple double encrypted code looks like a solid block of text. There are no words to grasp onto and transfer, you need a holistic approach.

Brute force? So do you mean you would try to match every known word in Linear A with every known word in English? But that'd be trillions and trillions of possible outcomes! And there'd be thousands of possible outcomes that would all make perfect sense? I mean "u menya chetyrye rublya" can translate to "I like dogs", "Menya paid ten talents of grain", "Rub owes me five cows", "I have four rubles" or something else entirely. Each of these translations makes sense. How are you going to find out which one is right using brute force techniques?

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Yeah, the starting point is that you need at least a partial translation. You need to have an idea of what at least some of the words mean.

You can work without a partial translation. Its harder but not impossible. As said earlier you cannot make a breakthrough without a seed, and you cant get a seed without cross reference. But you can hold to memory several candidate seeds and then test them to see if a pattern match occurs. This is one of the reasons you need a powerful computer and not do this by hand. It is brute force data crunching. Make or hold several assumptions at once so a text makes sense and pattern match all other known instances of those symbols, if they also make sense you have a match, if they do not you dont. Try again. It has to be an automated process because its a case of testing potential patterns in sequence.
With crude data crunching it might be possible to find patterns on their own by finding relatable symbols. Then you can attempt to work it backwards, for this to work you will need to have clues on the documents original function from where it was found and with what.


To make smart guesses you need instead to have an idea what a text is about, look for commonly recurring patterns in different types of texts. what sort of symbols would occur on a tablet found in a store of tax records. how would it differ from a store found in the remains of what looks like a temple, or someones house.

What practically would a "seed" mean in terms of attempting to translate a language? Would it be an idea of what an inscription could possibly mean? Because then there'd be a myriad seeds that't all fit perfectly but you'd still have no way of telling which one is right. And what if you simply can't tell the function of the inscription (because, well, you can't read it and given its location it could have had a hundred different functions)?
And let's say I have symbol Ш, which pattern matches with symbols А, О, И, У, Р, Я and a large amount of other symbols from the known corpus consisting of a total of 33 symbols? How would that help me understand the phonetic value of of Ш or the semantic value of the words in which it occurs? Or if I discover that the word "kajara" often occurs in inscriptions found in domestic settings, especially at the entrance to residences? It would not tell me anything about its meaning. Even with an ideal outcome, where I find out exactly which words are found in which settings at which frequency and in combination with what other words in what frequencies, I'd still not be any closer to translating anything. Because it would all still be meaningless patterns. I can only start giving meaning to these patterns when I find out what they are about.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Because otherwise you can't look for references to the word tin, since you do not know which of the ~30 words on your trade manifest means tin. Any of them could mean tin, so how you are going to say which one it is? What if it is a port that also frequently gets shipments of copper, grain and wood? How are you going to tell apart the word for tin from the word for grain? Or the words for dog and soup (which is what my example sentences were about)?

Ok.
Tin. No you dont know which word it tin, but tin would come up as a manifest in certain areas more often than others. Tin was a very important commodity as it made high quality bronze, the primary metal of the era. Tin came from only a few places, England and central Asia. The fact that the ancient Levant was mining tin in Cornwall is amazing enough.
We now a bit about tin so we can start a pattern search for symbols repeatedly found in some sources. Its not needed in most texts because people normally work with copper or bronze, tin is a component. It would be of great important around coastal ports which likely traded across the Mediterranean than inland. It would be of heightened importance in other specific locations too.
Searches between sets of documents from different locations might highlight which symbols are candidates to mean tin.

Grain. One of the first things you will want to look for are possible number systems, this is relatively easy because pictographic and other early number systems had some form of tally. If one is one line, two might be two lines. Numbers are one of the first patterns to search for.
Grain will be fairly ubiquitous in records, one could expect it to be very common but not immediately identifiable. It might be enough to identify numbers and a batch of which symbols mean products. If however you work out a number system you can begin to allocate guess names to products based on relative values. We know from wrecks what sorts of products were being traded at the time, and can give some guesses as to how many amphorae or pigs of various products are likely.
Grain may have higher numbers attached to it in most documents, its something you want to store a lot of.

Yes these examples are longshots, they all are. But you only need to make one breakthrough before you have a toe into the language. A computer gives you a good chance based cross referencing and analysis gives you a good chance.

I would love to know if any shipwreck tablets are readable. Good chance one is a stock inventory/bill of lading. You could get clues to potential cross matches by what was found on the wreck.
The Black Sea is offering up a lot of ancient wrecks in good condition.

But... how do you which numbers are high and which are low? You don't know any of their numbers! A few scripts use a tallying system, but many others don't (and even tallying marks can be highly ambiguous without context). And how do you tell grain apart from other commodities traded in bulk such as timber or wine? Or tin from other valuable commodities shipped over long distances such as amber or gold?
And yeah, you might get a document from a shipwreck that conveniently tells you what the ship carried. But how big is the chance that is document will be in Linear A or whatever unknown language you want to translate? And even then, with a single ship manifest you aren't going to be able to do much.

I really like your enthusiasm, but I don't think there is a big chance you are ever going to decipher a language this way. Sure, you can discover lots of useful patterns, especially if a writing system is logographic rather than syllabic or alphabetic. But getting at the actual meaning of texts? Patterns aren't going to be enough for that, so better hope some bilingual text shows up.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
For that you'd (or the computer) first need to already know the words "the", "to own" and "five" though. Do you see the difficulty? You need a starting point somewhere. If absolutely no variable is known, there is no possible starting point.

Hold that thought, because this is what I have been saying to you all along. You need to have several partial theories that together pattern match.
You make pointers to certain symbols meaning certain words or numbers, you can also have a category rather than a specific value. So you could have the [person] owns [number] [products] as a match without even being sure of the value of 'soldier', 'cows' and 'five'. You don't even have to have 'owns'.
The point is that you can place possible markers of meaning to symbols and then cross reference via the computer to see if it makes unrelated documents make sense. You need to batch your breakthroughs.

So at most I'd be able to identify basic elements of sentence structure like [object or subject][verb][number][object or subject]. Which we can already do without computers. How would that make unrelated documents make sense? At most we'd be able to confirm that they indeed appear to have the same sentence structure, or instead that this language appears to have variation in its sentence structures. We'd not get any closer to the meaning of the inscriptions.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

From the structure you could figure out which words indicate numbers, but how would you ever know which numbers? How do you know that the word "chetirye'' in Russian means 4, and not 5?

Symbolic language normally holds a clue as to numerical values. Let us assume this is not so and you don't know the order, you only need to fine one source with items in number order to have a pattern match. Maybe no such source exists, but then again it might. Its another variable for the computer to check.

I am sorry that I am not clearer, this is rather hard to describe. Look at a video on codebreaking to understand more. It essentially boils down to a combination of guesswork based on information clues and brute data crunching to look for patterns that work based on the guesses offered. I think the skills are likely transferable.

But... Orlanth, how will you know whether the numbers are in order if you don't know what the numbers are? If you find a list of words you can identify as numbers, how do you know they go 1, 2, 3, etc. and not 3, 1, 17 for example? And what if this language used a duodecimal, vigesimal or *shudders* a sexagesimal counting system rather than a decimal one?

Also if you find ship with cargo on board how do you know that the tablet you find on board has anything to do with that cargo? It might relate to the cargo, or be a missive for someone, or be related to how to control the ship, be a series of instructions - heck it could be someone's expensive shopping list.

Comparing patterns to something physical only works if you already know that there IS a relation between the text and items. Even then you won't know what they are or are not saying (it could be listing how much there is, or noting ownership, condition, intended destination, insurance status, what kind of shipping its under, etc...).

You'd need massive bodies of information for this kind of approach to translation. You'd need countless tablets from warehouses, ships, homes, business and more to even attempt to match such patterns to physical items. Even then it likely wouldn't be certain unless you could find some, even one, translated item translated from or into another known (or partly known) language.

 LordofHats wrote:
You tell people not to troll, and then you go quote a bunch of single sentences in a giant wall and respond to each of them with the same mix brand of red-herrings, goal post moving, and straw men that you always use.

Keep telling yourself that.
If you cannot handle the agrument attack the person.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Yeah, but all of it is language-based. All codes rely on the assumption that the underlying language is known. Afaik from my quick reading about, never has a code been cracked of which the underlying language was not known.

I don't see how you keep missing this point. The 'code' is the language. The documents are not expected to be actually encrypted.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Brute force? So do you mean you would try to match every known word in Linear A with every known word in English? But that'd be trillions and trillions of possible outcomes!

And there I thought i wasn't wasting my time explain, again and again how codebreaking works.
First you apply hypotheses, then you apply brute force calculations. One, two.
You don't try to brute force calculate a whole lexicon at the same time without suppositions.
Its been this was since Bletchley Park, only the computers have got more powerful.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

And there'd be thousands of possible outcomes that would all make perfect sense? I mean "u menya chetyrye rublya" can translate to "I like dogs", "Menya paid ten talents of grain", "Rub owes me five cows", "I have four rubles" or something else entirely. Each of these translations makes sense. How are you going to find out which one is right using brute force techniques?

The larger the dataset the larger area for pattern matching, It could be expected that you get potential hits between two documents, but between ten? twenty?
Note that for this to work you need a larger dataset, the bigger the better. I cannot expect results for a language for which we only have scattered fragments..

 Iron_Captain wrote:

What practically would a "seed" mean in terms of attempting to translate a language? Would it be an idea of what an inscription could possibly mean? Because then there'd be a myriad seeds that't all fit perfectly but you'd still have no way of telling which one is right.

That's where you use PATTERN MATCHING. You make a guess at the seed to fit a document, or more accurately the computer does based on the parameters you set it, then it pattern matches all other documents, or even parts of the same document. That has been codebreaking 101 since inception.
To explain pattern matching: Take a letter substitution code, something very simple as our example, if you determine that words EAT mean DOG other instances of E A and T would make sense in relation to other letters if they do not EAT doesnt mean DOG, but might mean CAT.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

And what if you simply can't tell the function of the inscription (because, well, you can't read it and given its location it could have had a hundred different functions)?

Yes it can, but it works.
The people at Bletchley Park (keep mentioning this because you can look it up and see how it works yourself) could have said. We cant guess what this code is about , it could have a hundred thousand applications. They would be right, except it would likely be more. All Enigma traffic essentially looks the same. But if it comes from a specified time and place it might have a specified function. You can GUESS that. This is where you get a possible toe into the code.
Note that I never said anything about certainties, there is a lot of trial and error.

The point to grasp is this. All the 'you'll never work that out', or 'you cant do this', is exactly what people have said about codes for exactly the same reasons. But the codes can be broken, that is a fact.
Double encryption makes things way harder, and that can be broken too.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

And let's say I have symbol Ш, which pattern matches with symbols А, О, И, У, Р, Я and a large amount of other symbols from the known corpus consisting of a total of 33 symbols? How would that help me understand the phonetic value of of Ш or the semantic value of the words in which it occurs? Or if I discover that the word "kajara" often occurs in inscriptions found in domestic settings, especially at the entrance to residences? It would not tell me anything about its meaning. Even with an ideal outcome, where I find out exactly which words are found in which settings at which frequency and in combination with what other words in what frequencies, I'd still not be any closer to translating anything. Because it would all still be meaningless patterns. I can only start giving meaning to these patterns when I find out what they are about.

Follow that thought through.

You can only start giving meaning to those patterns when you summise what they may be about. you dont need to start with a fact. You start with a supposition that you put to test. One, two.

There are many possible reasons for a word on a door, but we can guess as to what they are. This is still not of use unless you can pattern match the word in larger bodies of texts.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

But... how do you which numbers are high and which are low? You don't know any of their numbers!

Same proposition applies. One, two.

Whenever you ask the question, how do you know, you re asking the same question codebreakers ask themselves, and more interestingly those who think their task impossible.

'How do you know' is replaced with, 'we make a good guess' because on what we see in front of us.
Then you apply pattern matching. One, two.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

A few scripts use a tallying system, but many others don't (and even tallying marks can be highly ambiguous without context). And how do you tell grain apart from other commodities traded in bulk such as timber or wine? Or tin from other valuable commodities shipped over long distances such as amber or gold?

Still the same principle. To break the unbreakable code, which was what people thought Enigma was, first you apply your guesses. Tin comes from certain directions, gold from another. We have clues to this from surrounding evidence. We know where tin came from, gold is slightly trickier, and once in the system it might cycle round.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

And yeah, you might get a document from a shipwreck that conveniently tells you what the ship carried. But how big is the chance that is document will be in Linear A or whatever unknown language you want to translate? And even then, with a single ship manifest you aren't going to be able to do much.

Its part of the puzzle.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

I really like your enthusiasm, but I don't think there is a big chance you are ever going to decipher a language this way. Sure, you can discover lots of useful patterns, especially if a writing system is logographic rather than syllabic or alphabetic. But getting at the actual meaning of texts? Patterns aren't going to be enough for that, so better hope some bilingual text shows up.

On the contrary, even a few likely matches might open up the dataset. Lets go back to the simpler example of a letter substitution code in English. You are searching for likely matches for the letter E, and choose accordingly from commonly occuring letters. You might have ongoing guesses for E but leave it and move on to S and T. You don't discard the partial working you did with E.

Imagine that but on a much much larger scale. Back to Bletchley Park, the codebreaking was mostly done by hand, some extra high level cyphers used the first computers. A supposition was made, and it was tested, if the supposition was passed you had the code for the rest of the day, until it reset, as it did daily. If you failed you tried the next supposition.
What computer support there was was of a huge machine with a power of a tiny fraction of a pocket calculator.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

So at most I'd be able to identify basic elements of sentence structure like [object or subject][verb][number][object or subject]. Which we can already do without computers. How would that make unrelated documents make sense? At most we'd be able to confirm that they indeed appear to have the same sentence structure, or instead that this language appears to have variation in its sentence structures. We'd not get any closer to the meaning of the inscriptions.

Now look at what you can do with supposition and pattern matching today:

First scan in all the documents you can find by the same method, so the computer can analyse every symbol on every document. This should be preferably done via a very precise process so the computer can analyse for itseld what symbols are and even take partial pattern matches from partial symbols on the edges of or destroyed parts of documents.

Second the computer can tally all symbols, with a grand total of numbers of symbols of each type, cross referenced with what symbols they are adjacent to and other relational data.
The computer or users can add guesses for pattern match based on symbol frequency and it relation to other symbols.

Third each document has a subfile saying where it is from and a text box for those in the field to summise likely purposes of the document based on surrounding evidence of its location.
Users add values to this as guesses to start a pattern match.

All this is kept on file simultaneously, every partial guess is matched with the next partial guess. This is where a powerful computer is essential.

So back to tin as an example. You can try and guess which word is tin, but it is enough to have a tally of which documents came from ports likely to handle tin and were likely either manifests or tax/trade records dependant on location. Tin is a word more likely to occur there and less likely to appear elsewhere or in other document types. From this you might have a list of candidate words for tin. The computer holds onto that as a subfile annotation for each candidate symbol. A symbol might be a candidate for many different words, and some words might have several meanings.Gold and sun might be the same symbol.
Certain different documents can be expected to include the word grain, or specific types of produce, but said words should appear in documents everywhere.
The point is a modern computer can hold a large database of symbols and annotations of each one, and pattern match them ALL in all likely permutations. As the guesses grow a likelihood can be applied to a supposition. We might not have the luxury of knowing whether a supposition is ever wrong, as we are translating from an unknown language, our rules might not apply. But probabilities likely will, common things are common words. Some items will need to be recorded, such as items to be taxed. If we can guess that list, or better yet get a travellers report in a language we already know that further adds quality guesses.
Nothing is lost, the database is amended with possible matches. You might add a probability to a guess via the computer or manually. If you really think a symbol means gold, you can apply a priority to that, but it doesn't discard an earlier theory that the same symbol means iron.

If you are getting close to a breakthrough guesses will begin to match up across different documents, This could happen potentially at any time once you have sufficient number of suppositions.

It is an iterative process.

Now I am NOT saying that this process will work, what I am saying is that you should not assume that it WONT work. This process in much a simpler form has already achieved the 'impossible', codebreaking has moved on a long way from then. I honestly do think this is a worthy challenge, and not one to be handwaved away.

There are a lot of advantages even with translating a dead language from a limited dataset. First there is no time pressure, the 'code' doesn't reset every 24 hours or such, second it is not double encrypted, and third there is no reason to obfuscate your efforts so theories about document origins and purposes can be shared openly. A raw code might not appear in any recognisable linguistic form, in fact it may often appear as a solid binary stream with no annotation as to how to break it down, yet it is still a code, and in many cases can be broken. The computers can be trusted to do sterling work if we can trust ourselves to make worthy suppositions to test. A dead language is still a language, it has purpose in being understood directly, which gives us an advantage.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

But... Orlanth, how will you know whether the numbers are in order if you don't know what the numbers are? If you find a list of words you can identify as numbers, how do you know they go 1, 2, 3, etc. and not 3, 1, 17 for example? And what if this language used a duodecimal, vigesimal or *shudders* a sexagesimal counting system rather than a decimal one?

Every 'how do you know?' question is answered by, we don't, we guess and our guesses go in the database of suppositions and are annotations to each document or symbol. You process the entire datastack sequentially and repeatedly by a powerful computer and look for patterns. One build the supposition, two pattern match. Repeat with the next supposition, intelligent guesses welcome.

Non decimal counting systems are possible. In fact we now know that some ancient cultures used base 60 as a numerical system for engineering so that ugly fractions do not occur so often. Why not look for that too.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
Also if you find ship with cargo on board how do you know that the tablet you find on board has anything to do with that cargo? It might relate to the cargo, or be a missive for someone, or be related to how to control the ship, be a series of instructions - heck it could be someone's expensive shopping list.

Correct a hopeful text might prove fruitless.

 Overread wrote:

Comparing patterns to something physical only works if you already know that there IS a relation between the text and items. Even then you won't know what they are or are not saying (it could be listing how much there is, or noting ownership, condition, intended destination, insurance status, what kind of shipping its under, etc...).

Go through the process of supposition and pattern match enough times and there is a reason to hope for a breakthrough.

 Overread wrote:

You'd need massive bodies of information for this kind of approach to translation. You'd need countless tablets from warehouses, ships, homes, business and more to even attempt to match such patterns to physical items.

This is very true and I made this point early. The larger the dataset the better the chances of success. If surviving datasets of a particular language are very small there is little chance the dataset will be large enough to apply a meaningful process. To statistically process potential words you need a large volume preferably with a holistic view to the culture. How large, I cannot say. Several thousands tablets sounds good, half a dozen scraps does not.

 Overread wrote:

Even then it likely wouldn't be certain unless you could find some, even one, translated item translated from or into another known (or partly known) language.

Even now we don't know what all the symbols mean in the languages we do know.
We might not be blessed with finding another Rosetta stone, but we might finds travellers reports in a known language telling us of other cultures. The ancient Levant was well connected, there was a lot of international correspondence. Even without direct translations we might get useful inroads if we know what items were regularly taxed, as those commodities would likely be recorded and appear together in lists.

I think I'll get a link to this thread sent out on the Agade mailing list. The world's Near Easternists really need to read it. It'll change philology, history, and archaeology forever.

nfe wrote:
I think I'll get a link to this thread sent out on the Agade mailing list. The world's Near Easternists really need to read it. It'll change philology, history, and archaeology forever.

Just make sure I get full credit for my contributions!

And pay I should get pay too!!

 Overread wrote:

nfe wrote:
I think I'll get a link to this thread sent out on the Agade mailing list. The world's Near Easternists really need to read it. It'll change philology, history, and archaeology forever.

Just make sure I get full credit for my contributions!

And pay I should get pay too!!

Sorry mate there's a paradigm-shifting polymath that's gonna soak up all the attention.

To get back on topic, did anyone read the recent report about a number of Dead Sea Scroll fragments being found to be fakes?

You mean this one
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/22/us/bible-museum-fake-scrolls/index.html

Well not a report, but the summary suggests that its not the original ones, but those being bought and traded on the open market that are fakes; which is no shock in that wherever there is big money there are more fakes. With the science of faking getting better and better its no shock that they might well have been duped.

That said a lot of museums put on display copies of items, even some pretty famous finds have museums where most if not all the on display collection is a recreation. I believe most of the gold on display at the Sutton Hoo site in the UK is all copied (the originals being housed somewhere in the British Museum )

Yeah it's the ones in the museum of the Bible. They've been purported to be fakes for some time.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
To get back on topic, did anyone read the recent report about a number of Dead Sea Scroll fragments being found to be fakes?

I did.

Kind of brought it on themselves imo. Fake Dead Sea Scrolls are really damn common. Given Green's habit of stealing (EDIT: oh and by stealing, I mean buying from people who stole them, and given the state of the part of the Middle East he's been buying from I'm amazed no one's accused the guy of funding ISIS yet) historical artifacts from conflict nations and smuggling them into his private hands, you'd think he'd be able to stock his vanity project in the real deal but apparently not.

I have little problem with the fake antiquity trade, it makes the whole underground antiquity trade more dodgy and thus less attractive to those who want to try and sell real artifacts taken quietly from dig sites.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
To get back on topic, did anyone read the recent report about a number of Dead Sea Scroll fragments being found to be fakes?

I did.

Kind of brought it on themselves imo. Fake Dead Sea Scrolls are really damn common. Given Green's habit of stealing (EDIT: oh and by stealing, I mean buying from people who stole them, and given the state of the part of the Middle East he's been buying from I'm amazed no one's accused the guy of funding ISIS yet) historical artifacts from conflict nations and smuggling them into his private hands, you'd think he'd be able to stock his vanity project in the real deal but apparently not.

IIRC, he has been accused of funding ISIS. . . just not by anyone that actually matters.

 Orlanth wrote:
I have little problem with the fake antiquity trade, it makes the whole underground antiquity trade more dodgy and thus less attractive to those who want to try and sell real artifacts taken quietly from dig sites.

It has no discernable impact on this at all, unfortunately. One of the two directors of my project in Iraq leads the Dartmouth-based, CIA-backed satellite-monitoring project, the other is involved in cross-discplinary stuff with people tackling smuggling in the law department here at glasgow, and a large part of one of our grants (from the UK government) in iraq is to train local archaeologists to monitor looting practices so it comes up quite a lot whilst we're there. Most of it is local people looking for precious metals or other instrinsically valueble materials, or objects that would be difficult and awkward to fake for the little financial gain. My collegaue writing her PhD on looting practices in the Near East says this is pretty consistent with looting patterns worldwide.

It might have some impact on how viable art-faking is but on the other hand, once they've sold it, and you only need to sell it once, who cares? Plus the buyers are never in a position to investigate provenance and veracity well, and often don't care.

 Orlanth wrote:
We might not be blessed with finding another Rosetta stone, but we might finds travellers reports in a known language telling us of other cultures. The ancient Levant was well connected, there was a lot of international correspondence. Even without direct translations we might get useful inroads if we know what items were regularly taxed, as those commodities would likely be recorded and appear together in lists.

If one could find something like that, yes. I remember seeing a Youtube video where a curator from the British Museum went over some trader family clay tablets where daddy gave advice (to his son, the caravan master) on how to avoid customs and which wares to hide the best if caught and inspected.

Spetulhu wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
We might not be blessed with finding another Rosetta stone, but we might finds travellers reports in a known language telling us of other cultures. The ancient Levant was well connected, there was a lot of international correspondence. Even without direct translations we might get useful inroads if we know what items were regularly taxed, as those commodities would likely be recorded and appear together in lists.

If one could find something like that, yes. I remember seeing a Youtube video where a curator from the British Museum went over some trader family clay tablets where daddy gave advice (to his son, the caravan master) on how to avoid customs and which wares to hide the best if caught and inspected.

Lots of these from Kültepe (all from Lower Town levels II and Ib (first three centuries of the 2nd millennium) , but almost nowhere else until a long time later. There are also lots of travel itineraries but these are largely lists of cities visited on a given trade journey. Additionally, the bulk of the people interacted with (textually, at least, which essentially means private, elite businesspeople and palace institutions) are all part of the same cultural milieu and largely using the same writing systems. The handful of (known) languages we have left to decipher are earlier or far removed. The only example you would expect to find something like this to shed light on (that I'm aware of) is Ogham*, which was in use alongside a Latin but which no Latin text appears to even acknolwedge. Headway is being made on it, though, but is largely restricted to identifying proper nouns insofar as I understand it.

*interestingly, Ogham is one of the few writing systems that does benefit from laser scanning at current levels of technology (though RTI is still often preferred), because it is exclusively written on stone (or I suppose on organics that don't survive) which degrades under weathering to a level that makes it impossible to read by eye (unlike clay tablets, which, as I mentioned above, basically survive competely readable in bad mobile phone images or are destroyed totally).

nfe wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
I have little problem with the fake antiquity trade, it makes the whole underground antiquity trade more dodgy and thus less attractive to those who want to try and sell real artifacts taken quietly from dig sites.

It has no discernable impact on this at all, unfortunately. One of the two directors of my project in Iraq leads the Dartmouth-based, CIA-backed satellite-monitoring project, the other is involved in cross-discplinary stuff with people tackling smuggling in the law department here at glasgow, and a large part of one of our grants (from the UK government) in iraq is to train local archaeologists to monitor looting practices so it comes up quite a lot whilst we're there. Most of it is local people looking for precious metals or other instrinsically valueble materials, or objects that would be difficult and awkward to fake for the little financial gain. My collegaue writing her PhD on looting practices in the Near East says this is pretty consistent with looting patterns worldwide.

It might have some impact on how viable art-faking is but on the other hand, once they've sold it, and you only need to sell it once, who cares? Plus the buyers are never in a position to investigate provenance and veracity well, and often don't care.

Is it that prevalent? Sounds like you have a large setup, however it might just be an excuse for population monitoring by another name, it's an 'independent' Iraq after all.

I could imagine a lot of artifacts going missing in wartime, after all it happened in Europe too, but what about outside Iraq/other war zones, does a lot go missing from sites. From what I remember the Greeks were fairly clued up to this and had competent antiquities policing, though my connexions in this are now way outdated, (third hand, early 80's).

I prefer stolen to destroyed by ISIS as happened a lot in Syria and on occasion in Egypt.

As for fakes, the idea is to flood the market with fakes. This might not apply here but there was an idea to package human toenail clippings as rhino horn and ship it to China as oriental medicine. It didn't need to be done on any scale, just enough to destroy confidence in the rhino horn market. If a customer in a health shop doesn't know what the medical powder is, and its rumoured it might be toenail clippings from random Africans, yum, they might think twice about buying the product. Destroying confidence in the product might help limit inducements to poach rhinos.
For reference rhino horn and nails are made from keratin, the difference is not easy to distinguish especially when processed as a powder.

 Orlanth wrote:

For reference rhino horn and nails are made from keratin, the difference is not easy to distinguish especially when processed as a powder.

Considering that rhino horn doesn't even cure anything it would be hard to tell the difference based on performance.
The risk with market flooding though is that you might destroy the high profits, but you don't destroy the market demand, if anything you can run the risk of increasing market demand. So whilst the profits might be lower the whole poacher smuggling ring will still be active; plus the higher paying clients will still likely use that network to buy "Authentic" horn.

The best way to tackle it is a combination of education and government legislation. The issue now is that China has invested heavily into African countries so they have a tighter bond to them; plus the profits are so large that it drives itself forward on the high profitability.

Right now the main weapon is that they are darting and then cutting the horns off wild rhinos in a bid to make them pointless to hunt by poachers.

 Orlanth wrote:

nfe wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
I have little problem with the fake antiquity trade, it makes the whole underground antiquity trade more dodgy and thus less attractive to those who want to try and sell real artifacts taken quietly from dig sites.

It has no discernable impact on this at all, unfortunately. One of the two directors of my project in Iraq leads the Dartmouth-based, CIA-backed satellite-monitoring project, the other is involved in cross-discplinary stuff with people tackling smuggling in the law department here at glasgow, and a large part of one of our grants (from the UK government) in iraq is to train local archaeologists to monitor looting practices so it comes up quite a lot whilst we're there. Most of it is local people looking for precious metals or other instrinsically valueble materials, or objects that would be difficult and awkward to fake for the little financial gain. My collegaue writing her PhD on looting practices in the Near East says this is pretty consistent with looting patterns worldwide.

It might have some impact on how viable art-faking is but on the other hand, once they've sold it, and you only need to sell it once, who cares? Plus the buyers are never in a position to investigate provenance and veracity well, and often don't care.

Is it that prevalent?

Depends how you define it, I auppose, but it is common.

Sounds like you have a large setup, however it might just be an excuse for population monitoring by another name, it's an 'independent' Iraq after all.

What do you mean?

I could imagine a lot of artifacts going missing in wartime, after all it happened in Europe too, but what about outside Iraq/other war zones, does a lot go missing from sites.

Iraq isn't currently a warzone and much of the coubtry wasn't even at the height if ISIS and during the last Iraq War. Artefact theft and nighthawking is oretty common the world over. It's worst in rural West Asia but it's a problem everywhere.

From what I remember the Greeks were fairly clued up to this and had competent antiquities policing, though my connexions in this are now way outdated, (third hand, early 80's).

Greece is actually historically quite bad at that. Scandinavia and France have amongst the toughest laws with the most effort put into enforcing them.

I prefer stolen to destroyed by ISIS as happened a lot in Syria and on occasion in Egypt.

They weren't ever really destroying portable antiquities. The focus was on monuments meaningful to local identity. They did steal a lot of material to sell, however.

As for fakes, the idea is to flood the market with fakes. This might not apply here but there was an idea to package human toenail clippings as rhino horn and ship it to China as oriental medicine. It didn't need to be done on any scale, just enough to destroy confidence in the rhino horn market. If a customer in a health shop doesn't know what the medical powder is, and its rumoured it might be toenail clippings from random Africans, yum, they might think twice about buying the product. Destroying confidence in the product might help limit inducements to poach rhinos.
For reference rhino horn and nails are made from keratin, the difference is not easy to distinguish especially when processed as a powder.

Yeah. As I say, it would be awfully expensive to fake the stuff that is regularly looted relative to its cost. Not to mention the sheer quantity you'd need to produce to even put something statistically significant into the market. Then there's the ethical issue of contributing to a black market, even with fakes.

nfe wrote:

Sounds like you have a large setup, however it might just be an excuse for population monitoring by another name, it's an 'independent' Iraq after all.

What do you mean?

Iraq won't ever gets its self determination back, that was the whole point of going in to begin with. However excuses are needed to monitor people. I wonder if that is part of what is happening.

nfe wrote:

I could imagine a lot of artifacts going missing in wartime, after all it happened in Europe too, but what about outside Iraq/other war zones, does a lot go missing from sites.

Iraq isn't currently a warzone and much of the coubtry wasn't even at the height if ISIS and during the last Iraq War. Artefact theft and nighthawking is oretty common the world over. It's worst in rural West Asia but it's a problem everywhere.

Close enough, walking around parts of Iraq is especially unhealthy.

nfe wrote:

From what I remember the Greeks were fairly clued up to this and had competent antiquities policing, though my connexions in this are now way outdated, (third hand, early 80's).

Greece is actually historically quite bad at that. Scandinavia and France have amongst the toughest laws with the most effort put into enforcing them.

Sad to hear that. My father was involved in security in SBA Cyprus, and at the time the locals were very clued up on antiquities monitoring, and had a lot of help from Greece also. Maybe it was just Cyprus, and maybe it was because of SBA assist.

nfe wrote:

I prefer stolen to destroyed by ISIS as happened a lot in Syria and on occasion in Egypt.

They weren't ever really destroying portable antiquities. The focus was on monuments meaningful to local identity. They did steal a lot of material to sell, however.

Makes 'sense' I suppose, its only unholy and must be destroyed if you cant make a profit from it.

nfe wrote:
Then there's the ethical issue of contributing to a black market, even with fakes.

I would call it more like attempts at sabotaging the black market than contributing to it.

It's clearly unethical to create fakes with the intention to release them into the general market.

 Orlanth wrote:

nfe wrote:

Sounds like you have a large setup, however it might just be an excuse for population monitoring by another name, it's an 'independent' Iraq after all.

What do you mean?

Iraq won't ever gets its self determination back, that was the whole point of going in to begin with. However excuses are needed to monitor people. I wonder if that is part of what is happening.

Can you be a bit more clear about what you think is happening with a looting monitoring project, please?

nfe wrote:

I could imagine a lot of artifacts going missing in wartime, after all it happened in Europe too, but what about outside Iraq/other war zones, does a lot go missing from sites.

Iraq isn't currently a warzone and much of the coubtry wasn't even at the height if ISIS and during the last Iraq War. Artefact theft and nighthawking is oretty common the world over. It's worst in rural West Asia but it's a problem everywhere.

Close enough, walking around parts of Iraq is especially unhealthy.

How much time do you spend there? There are parts that are sketchy, especially in the south, but the country is pretty stable and I happily walk around by myself. As do my female collegues.

nfe wrote:
Then there's the ethical issue of contributing to a black market, even with fakes.

I would call it more like attempts at sabotaging the black market than contributing to it.

If you're putting material in, you're contributing.

Incidentally, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary sent around a press release today stating that they believe some of their Dead Sea Scrolls are also fake.

If you're buying them now, and not from Israel (who will never sell them) they're in all chance either stolen or fake. Very few scroll pieces are held elsewhere and the places that have them won't give them up. It's a really classic case of "damn your that gullible" in this.