For the Codebreakers
by rrusczyk, Jun 24, 2008, 1:58 PM
Osud pointed me to some old-school math:
http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/dl/lineart/P005283_l.jpg
http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/dl/lineart/P003533_l.jpg
Here are some hints Osud gave:
For the first:
For the second:
For both:
The images are from the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (http://cdli.ucla.edu), and are tablet numbers MSVO 1, 216 and W 20274,35.
Can you figure out what's going here?
http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/dl/lineart/P005283_l.jpg
http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/dl/lineart/P003533_l.jpg
Here are some hints Osud gave:
For the first:
Osud wrote:
The counting units are (in order of appearance on the tablet) small circles, something that looks like o>, and large circles.
For the second:
Osud wrote:
The counting units here are o>, o> + something long and skinny and crescent-shaped with horizontal lines, o> + a horizontal line through it, and a large circle. Keep in mind that part of the upper right of the tablet has been broken off. The broken-off part contained the long and skinny and crescent-shaped thing to go with the rightmost o> of the top two entries in the right column.
For both:
Osud wrote:
The front of each tablet (in the top of the picture) is boxed off into entires, where each entry has some counting units and then some sort of verbal description for context. The back of each tablet (at the bottom of the picture) contains the sum.
The images are from the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (http://cdli.ucla.edu), and are tablet numbers MSVO 1, 216 and W 20274,35.
Can you figure out what's going here?
February 2012
January 2012