This reminds me of a scene from Eurotrip poking fun at difficult foreign words where an American tourist is given a safe word they cannot pronounce.
The scene is NSFW, so don’t click through if that’s an issue for you:
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Prime AIF material here.
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When guess-the-verb puzzles get dangerous…
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For a third one:
nu uttar=pat apāt natta kaneššun
then word-ABS=EMPH that-ABS not recognize-1S.PERF.ACT
“I didn’t recognize that word.”
I was torn on how to express “verb”, since we don’t know of any grammatical terminology in Hittite. So it’s either going to be “word” or “action”, and I settled on “word” (uttar). Then I put an intensifying marker on it to make the lines more balanced.
Or maybe I’ll drop the intensive marker and shorten both lines a little bit…
Perfect.
Also nicely small and portable compared to the others.
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The lab I was working at is still having technical difficulties, but I’ve found another place to get things printed. With any luck I’ll have these three seals in hand tomorrow!
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Three seals in hand! The 3D printers at the other lab have a few limitations, and I’m going to see if I can tweak some settings to make them come out smoother; they have a few rough edges right now. But they print great!
(The lighting direction isn’t right for these pics, but it’s what I’ve got right now.)
“That’s not a verb I recognize.”
“You can’t go that way.”
“You can’t see any such thing.”
I’m still going to experiment a bit more to see if I can polish them any further. A coat of spray paint might also help the little rough bits. But one way or another, they’re going into the IFComp prize pool!
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Awesome!
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I’d like to get my hands on the code/files for these with a mind to end up with cylinder seals made of fired clay. Or a pattern to print and apply as acid-resist on a cylinder of metal, limestone, or marble.
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I find it fun to see how games react to foul language.
Real adventurers don't use such language.
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I can definitely hook you up with that! All the code is open-source but a real pain to use on your own, since I haven’t put much effort into making it easy to install. But it outputs SCAD for the model, which I then manually tweak a little bit (there’s one parameter that I still haven’t figured out how to calculate so I have to just try a few different values and see what looks right) and export to an STL for printing.
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Now that I’ve got access to the ECE lab again, I’m doing some experiments to see if I can make them any smoother. The ones I already have work fine, but I want the prizes for IFComp to be as perfect as possible.
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From H2G2:
“No tea”
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Ran into this video about seals and signatures.
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All right! Time for a long-overdue update!
So, last fall I made two versions of each seal, using two different 3D printers. And I’ve been trying to find some way to show the different versions so the winners can choose which they want.
Turns out, photographing cuneiform is really hard! So if some of the signs aren’t appearing—that’s generally my fault, not the seal’s.
So for comparison purposes, here are some close-up photos, where I cranked up the contrast as high as I could to bring out the details.
The white ones look a bit jagged, but the wedges are extremely visible.
The black ones are smoother, but as a result, the wedges aren’t quite as pronounced.
Both of them make good impressions on the clay, even if it doesn’t photograph well:
“You can’t see any such thing.”
“You can’t go that way.”
“That’s not a verb I recognize.”
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I just love the archaeologically correct bright blue putty!
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I got a big box of 1oz containers of Play-Doh to use in class, and the students keep not returning the red ones… 
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You should make them write “I will not steal the nice teacher’s red play-doh” a hundred times in Hittite cuneiform.
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How deep are you pressing the seals into the play-doh? The historical examples I’ve seen are pressed much deeper. Also, play-doh isn’t really good for holding impressions. Maybe get some plasticine or other non-hardening modeling clay?
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Hardening clay would be fine, I think. Then the students get a hard “scriptboard” without needing an oven. Only thing to worry about is to keep the raw (yet unused) material tightly packed without letting air at it.
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