This is the first three words of the first line ever translated from Hittite, nu zuwan ezzatteni, watar-ma ekwtteni “you shall eat bread, and drink water”. It comes from a text known as the Instructions for Temple Officials, and seems to be an idiom for “you shall live and flourish”. Since the word zuwa in Hittite can mean basically anything made with flour (everything from cake to porridge), using it for shortbread seemed appropriate!
Yep! That was the key to the decipherment actually—the word zuwa “bread” was written with a logogram (a sign that means a particular word rather than a particular sound, like kanji), so scholars knew it meant “bread” even if they didn’t know how the word was pronounced, and it was surrounded by watar, ezzatteni, ekwtteni, which look a lot like English “water” and Latin edete “you all eat” and aqua “water”. So Bedřich Hrozný made the assumption that it was related to English and Latin, worked from there, and soon could understand significant amounts of text!
The seven signs here are nu NINDA-an ez-za-te-ni, which is as short as I could get the text without losing the meaning; the original is written with even more signs, e-ez-za-at-te-ni, to reduce ambiguity!
Googles cylinder seal. huh, that’s neat… and seems to support my impression people of the past cared more about tactility than modern design.
And now I’m wondering if the baked good and the impressions are hard and deep enough respectively to touch read the cuneiform… and since you’re using it to add texture to baked goods, I’m curious about using icing as ink to stamp icing drawings on to treats.
Yeah! It’s an open question how much the tactile element mattered with cuneiform—it might have been somewhat incidental, clay is the writing material they had, and it’s a lot easier to stamp into clay than it is to drag a stylus through it—but it’s notoriously hard to read in a photograph, and the standard way to read a cuneiform tablet is to hold it up and tilt it around so the impressions catch the light.
Some historical cuneiform is tiny enough that I don’t think it could be read by touch, but the impressions in these cookies are 10-15mm high and approximately 3-5mm deep, so I’m guessing a skilled braille reader could handle those!
It’s so interesting to consider that paper/papyrus was such an innovation when it would seem so obvious to use ink or paint to mark an existing surface like a leaf before going the “carve in stone” or “stamp in clay/cement” route first. Though I suppose written words back then likely carried more value that didn’t warrant a discardable medium accessible to everyone. And I suppose leaves would decay, so the process to make a flat sheet for writing that didn’t weigh several pounds and could be rolled up or stacked and stored in less space - or carried as a message - that would last was the innovation.
You’d be surprised—throughout the Middle Ages, for example, the most common “writing” (as in inking) material was vellum, which was extremely expensive (since it came from animal skin and animals are expensive, plus needing to be prepared), so for everyday purposes people would carve messages into wax tablets instead!
New evidence (as in, within the last year!) suggests that these were the most common way of writing in Mesopotamia as well as Greece and Rome, up through the Renaissance, until eventually paper got cheap enough to be disposable! (Over in Egypt, meanwhile, papyrus was always cheap, so they were using it for ephemeral things from the very beginning.)
Back in Mesopotamia, though, writing started with clay because clay was what they had tons of. Trees and stone deposits were scarce; everything was made of clay if possible, because clay and water were the two resources they could never possibly run out of. So when they started using tokens to barter with instead of actually carrying their cows and bags of wheat and jars of beer and so on to the market with them, they made those tokens out of clay; when they started packaging up those tokens for convenience, they did it in an envelope made of clay; when they started labelling those envelopes so you didn’t have to break them open to check every time, they did it by stamping the tokens into the clay to leave impressions. From there, switching from stamps meaning “SHEEP SHEEP SHEEP SHEEP SHEEP” to “SHEEP ×5” was a small step; and the rest is history!
That said, though, we do also have evidence that cuneiform was adapted for writing with ink and brush instead of with a stylus (at least in the Neo-Assyrian era). The problem is, this “inked cuneiform” survives in a grand total of three(!) damaged lines of text, out of the tens of thousands of tablets! Ink just doesn’t survive the millennia the way stamped impressions do. So there’s definitely some survivor bias involved.
OMG that’s brilliant! You just heat the surface to re-use it. People were walking around with re-usable tablets - similar to an Etch-a-Sketch or simplified version of a “pressure tablet”. I had one as a child which was a “doodle pad”: it was a slightly sticky black surface with a gray plastic sheet overlaying it. When you scraped with a stylus the black background stuck to the plastic showing marks. To clear it, you peeled the plastic away from the background and could write or draw again.
huh i never knew that’s how those toy tablets got erased. i think mine was slightly magnetic, or it at least seemed to be cus it would draw a slight fuzz even with the metal pen tip slightly away from the screen.
There are electronic ones now that I think use LCD tech to turn off the part of the screen that is pressed making it transparent to show a color through it. There were other low tech toy ones that worked the same way as my doodle pad, but you’d slide a rod underneath that separated the plastic and the background to clear it. I think those used iron filings inside the board to stick and show through the white surface which is why a non-contact touch with the magnetic stylus created “fuzz”.
“Magna Doodle” is the one with the sliding bar. The electronic LCD ones are extremely popular now and show up in searches more than the non-electronic ones.
Slightly similar tech, but veering wildly from Daniel’s topic: I also had the tablet where you used a magnet to arrange iron filings as “hair” on an underlying picture.
Magna-Doodles were the ones I always used as a kid. Fond memories!
Yeah, wax tablets are amply attested from the Roman period onwards; even with cheap Egyptian papyrus available, most Romans would use a tablet instead, since it was convenient to be able to erase it at will. If you make the wax soft enough, you can have a flat “spatula” on the back of the stylus to rub out individual letters you don’t want. We have art showing them being used in Mesopotamia, but until this year it was generally thought they were only used for writing Aramaic (in letters), not anything in cuneiform. But a tablet has been found with traces of wax stuck to it showing cuneiform signs, and now I’m experimenting with making a replica to use in class!
I’m aware of at least 3, maybe 4 different kinds of low-tech, self-contained drawing tablets that were marketed at kids prior to the advent of practical, mass market tablet PCs.
1 had a sheet of translucent plastic over a sheet of a harder plastic, using a stylus would press the translucent plastic against the background, letting more of it’s color show through and it was erased byrunning a slider between the two layers. I think I once got a pocket sized one as a toy in a fast food kids’ meal that drew pink lines on a magenta background(the translucent layer was magenta, the background was white when a curious young me took it apart to try and figure out how it works.
Etch-a-sketch, where the drawing surface is covered in aluminium powder, the internal stylus scrapes the powder from the screen, and erasure involves shaking the unit to recoat the inside of the drawing surface.
Mag-a-doodle, where you have a grid of small cells filled with iron filings and passing a magnet over the surface cases the filings to stick to the back of the surface, with erasure done via sliding a magnetic bar under the drawing surface.
A fourth I remember also used magnets to draw with if memory serves, but left much smoother lines and I think it had a feeling of there being liquid inside, making me wonder if it used ferrofluid instead of iron filings… I want to say it was branded for the 90s Ghostwriter show, but 30 years and a very fuzzy memory doesn’t help.
Though, for what it’s worth, I own a set of 1" diameter iron rune stones engraved with the Elder Futhark that are pretty touch readable… at least within the caveat that I don’t know how to read runes… and while I have no idea where cuneiform fits into the evolution of written language, I understand both writing systems consist entirely of straight segments and for the same reason: ease of carving… Though I’m open to being corrected by any linguistic historians/historical linguists.
And now I’m wondering how difficult it would be to create a modern version of a Roman wax tablet or if anyone sells such at a reasonable price.
Definitely true for runes, but in cuneiform it’s not quite ease of carving—it’s ease of stamping. The earliest ancestors of cuneiform were incised into clay with a sharp point, but this is messy and not very effective; the lines you make are thin and disappear easily while you handle the clay, and you pile up a bunch of detritus on your stylus that makes a mess of what you’re writing. (This was a big problem in Linear A and Linear B writing.)
The key innovation in cuneiform, that gives it the distinctive shape, is that this is only a problem if you drag the stylus through the clay. If you just stamp the stylus in, using a square corner instead of a point, you end up with big impressions and no mess! This is why there are no curves in cuneiform: every stroke is made by pressing the stylus down into the clay like a stamp.
Oddly enough I’ve never found them for sale, but I have been in contact with some people who do research on them, and I have a recipe for the appropriate type of wax that I’m going to experiment with over the holidays!
Yes: all of your examples look like they were made with a chisel that is pressed or tapped into the medium - similar to how you can create numbers with straight lines by including or deleting segments from the full number 8 on a digital clock.
