It doesn't mean gold, it means thousand!
August 24, 2010 3:07 AM   Subscribe

You've read the press release, watched the video, and checked out the how-to blog. You, too, could follow in the tracks of the Space Squid folks by publishing your prose in clay tablets, immortalising it for the ages.
posted by rodgerd (11 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
"A digital PDF of Space Squid issue 9, with far more content, will be available at spacesquid.com."

Oh, the irony.

Imagine if the Sumerians had PDF and the Internets; We would have had Fark.com by the end of the 2nd Dynasty of Lagash.
posted by chavenet at 3:39 AM on August 24, 2010


Well, archaeologists and historians love the Sumerians because they used clay for mundane everyday communications, so they have a vast record of stuff that usually doesn't get recorded. They find that a lot more interesting than the big Official Carvings that are usually all that survive.

Also they had a nifty trick for secure communications: roll the clay tablet into a sphere and bake it. Break it to read, and if it arrives unbroken you know no-one intercepted the message.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:30 AM on August 24, 2010


You also have to impress your (difficult-to-reproduce) seal on the outside of the sphere or you are susceptible to Sumerian-in-the-middle attack.
posted by DU at 4:58 AM on August 24, 2010 [3 favorites]


A digital PDF

As opposed to the other kind of PDF.
posted by Gator at 5:43 AM on August 24, 2010


WTF? The text is English and not Sumerian cuneiform.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 6:19 AM on August 24, 2010


Sumerian-in-the-middle attack.

Spit-take.
posted by jimfl at 7:01 AM on August 24, 2010


I haven't, haven't and haven't. I won't.
posted by tommasz at 9:00 AM on August 24, 2010


Oh the long lived wonders of clay! An artistic member of my family spent a while making interesting clay figurines that he fired and then buried various places (some of historical significance) to fuck with archeologists in the distant future.
posted by Long Way To Go at 11:12 AM on August 24, 2010


They're being very cavalier with clay, aren't they?
posted by ericbop at 12:08 PM on August 24, 2010


Also they had a nifty trick for secure communications: roll the clay tablet into a sphere cylinder and bake it. Break it to read, and if it arrives unbroken you know no-one intercepted the message.

FTFY, TheophileEscargot.
posted by IAmBroom at 2:57 PM on August 24, 2010


From a Teaching Company course Origin of Civilization by Scott MacEachern:
As we have seen, small clay tokens appear in Hassunan sites in northern Mesopotamia; and actually we have some limited evidence of tokens of these sorts appearing on sites in the Near East as far back as 8000. They're a common feature of later farming societies in these areas, and they don't look very impressive, as you can see; they're fairly small and formless. Yet they seem to have been used in an inventory system; these tokens were literally tokens, probably of some kind of agricultural or craft products. So we have this prehistory of these tokens through time.

By the middle of the Uruk period, about 3500, a little bit before, these tokens were themselves being stored within hollow clay spheres or balls called bullae. You can see that one would take the tokens, and then globe them into this small clay ball that served to do two things: It served first to conceal the contents, the specific tokens, from outside examination; and second, when it had dried, to prevent covert tampering with the contents. You couldn't get back into this without breaking it.

These bullae, then, were, increasingly during the Uruk period as well, marked with seal impressions; that is, the people were taking stone seals and marking them with a variety of different symbols on the outside. This provided evidence of ownership and/or involvement in economic transactions, those economic transactions that were inventoried inside the bullae. So one would have both a secure inventory, with the tokens inside, plus ownership designated by the stamp seals on the outside on the clay on the bullae.

Slightly later in Uruk times, clay tablets begin to appear on Uruk sites; and these clay tablets bear imprints resembling both the tokens and the seals. So this is a clay tablet, and then the tokens and the seals are actually pressed into the clay physically. They seem to be acting almost as a supplement to the bullae, because when you think about it, these would allow inventories to be checked more easily without destroying the object of record within.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 11:11 PM on August 24, 2010


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