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July 5, 2009
It Looks Like I Joined the Wrong Club
At least today, my SBL membership isn't much help.
During the time I made a living off my Electrical Engineering undergraduate degree, I never joined the IEEE (an acronym for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the "I triple E"). Now that I spend a lot of my time worrying about the ancient world, I wish I had. Why? Because I don't have immediate access to papers published in IEEE journals. And why does that matter? Well, here's the reason: Michail Panagopoulos, et al., "Automatic Writer Identification of Ancient Greek Inscriptions," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 31, no. 8, pp. 1404-1414, July 2009.
And here's the abstract,
This paper introduces a novel methodology for the classification of ancient Greek inscriptions according to the writer who carved them. Inscription writer identification is crucial for dating the written content, which in turn is of fundamental importance in the sciences of history and archaeology. To achieve this, we first compute an ideal or "platonic” prototype for the letters of each inscription separately. Next, statistical criteria are introduced to reject the hypothesis that two inscriptions are carved by the same writer. In this way, we can determine the number of distinct writers who carved a given ensemble of inscriptions. Next, maximum likelihood considerations are employed to attribute all inscriptions in the collection to the respective writers. The method has been applied to 24 Ancient Athenian inscriptions and attributed these inscriptions to six different identified hands in full accordance with expert epigraphists' opinions.
Roger Pearse has more from a New Science account of the paper. While I doubt the Panagopoulos, et al., paper addresses the issue, I wonder if the same general approach or even the same exact approach could be used to group Ugaritic tablets or even Akkadian texts by scribe. Akkadian might be a lot harder because the complexities of the writing system reduces the frequency of individual glyphs. The larger number of glyphs the lower the frequency of any one glyph. Or might the much smaller set of individual wedge impressions that makeup the more complex glyphs make the task easier? I rather doubt it. It is fun to think about. I also wonder if the technique might help identify joins among a set clay tablet fragments or a set of papyrus fragments.
PS. I don't remember exactly when history or even archaeology became sciences but I'm glad to hear it.
Posted by Duane Smith at July 5, 2009 3:03 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
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Posted by: Theophrastus at July 5, 2009 3:36 PM
If I briefly ponder on the puzzle, I suppose in cuneiform scripts, examining the depths of the clay impressions, their angles, and any minute differences in stylus shape might be some handy ways of separating one author from the other. I never thought about this problem before. Abnormally... it is interesting.
Posted by: Glen Gordon at July 6, 2009 12:55 PM
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