Why Cuneiform?

• There's a lot of it.400,000+ cuneiform texts bear witness to 3500 years of history, from the invention of the wheel (and writing itself) to the Roman Empire. These texts – administrative texts, personal letters, royal inscriptions, and more – give a view from the ground during some of the most foundational events in our past.
• We have a lot left to learn.With so many texts and so few specialists with the skills to read them (Assyriologists), progress has been slow in understanding what these texts have to tell us about the story of human civilization. Basic digital infrastructure and new computational methods promise a new way of working which will dramatically accelerate this project.
• These texts are largely inaccessible to the general public.Because an exceedingly small proportion of the corpus has been translated, years of specialized training is effectively a prerequisite for engaging with the first half of human history. (And some Assyriologists are baffled why there isn't a greater cultural awareness...) My goal is to make this rich material accessible to everyone. I'm dedicating years to learning these languages so no one else has to.
• I believe I have a moral duty to work on these problems.I believe the skills I built at AbstractCRE uniquely position me to work on these problems. Turns out, whether you're working with legal documents 4 years old or 4000 years old, the solutions needed aren't all too different.