this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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This is incredibly awesome and a great use for AI. They have hundreds of thousands of these tablets that haven't been deciphered yet. I know most are just inventory lists, but what if there are stories hidden in some of them? Very cool.
duuuude so much can be learned just from boring lists. exciting!
Serious question, like what?
a list, especially bulk lists, would belie frequencies and cadences of objects and services.
patterns emerge on usage, trade, priorities.. possibly down to personal preferences of individual humans at the time.
I guess that would be cool to compare our lives with ancient lives.
On the top of my head, the exact ingredients used for roman concrete would be a nice list.
Its stronger then today’s concrete and were still not sure wether they did or did not use blood as an ingredient.
Just in general we can learn about resources used and how these might be valued, we might already know if some of those were locally present, if not that indicates trading, which indicates diplomatic relations.
If we know how some stuff were valued we might learn about the status and wealth of the list owner.
We can learn about people diet, writing, differences in dialect compared to 3 towns over, peoples names, wether people are a commodity (slaves),… i keep finding more really.
If you have an office job you may release how much important data we keep in spreadsheets everywhere. Spreadsheets are the digital equivalent of boring lists.
They know that now, they used volcanic ash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
But all of your points are well taken.
A lot of what we know about the construction of the Egyptian pyramids came from what are essentially ancient spreadsheets.
What they have eaten/cultivated on their fields, their organization structure, trading networks, stuff like that. Most what we know of Babylonian culture is from such lists (they were notorious for such lists).