Friday, February 24, 2012

Relevant historic texts


The Cyrus cylinder is arguably one important piece of world heritage. It consists of a text written in the cuneiform script. The text is still relevant after two thousand year so much so, that there is a TED presentation about it.

 

The text is in translation available at Wikisource. Given that the English Wikisource will support WebFonts next week, having a freely licensed font to do justice to the Cyrus cylinder is the next step before we can reliably show the text as it exists on the cylinder. Having a translation adds value to the source.
Thanks,
    GerardM

5 comments:

Mike Peel said...

Hi Gerard. Thanks for using the picture I took of the Cyrus cylinder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrus_Cylinder.jpg), but please could you attribute it as per the license? Thanks. Mike Peel

GerardM said...

Hoi, click on the picture and you go to the Commons image.
Thanks, Gerard

Mike Peel said...

Thanks Gerard. It didn't do that before - it went to a local copy of the image - so thanks for fixing the link. :-)

Gustavocarra said...

It's an impressive nice work, indeed, it is. :) Congratulations for such a huge and good job.

But Gerard, please: I'm absolutely sure that you're aware that having the fonts doesn't mean that it will make a tool to automatically perform good transliterations of ancient pieces. I know lots of ancient pieces in which the lettering is a matter of deep paleographic research, and even a single character changes enterly the whole meaning of the text. Think about the Jeselsohn Stone, just as an example. Your wellcome :)

GerardM said...

Having a Wiki community care about ancient texts and their transliteration makes sense. It is the Wiki that allows for discussion through its talk pages.

One possible conclusion will also be that some Unicode implementations need to be expanded because characters are missing.. :)
Thanks,
GerardM