Do we know if people writing in cuneiform in clay with a stylus could write fast?
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Do we know if people writing in cuneiform in clay with a stylus could write fast? Has anyone ever had a contest to see how fast people can write numbers that way (in sexagesimal obviously) ?
I think that if you try to do these things sometimes you make discoveries that just staring at a photo will never make evident.
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Do we know if people writing in cuneiform in clay with a stylus could write fast? Has anyone ever had a contest to see how fast people can write numbers that way (in sexagesimal obviously) ?
I think that if you try to do these things sometimes you make discoveries that just staring at a photo will never make evident.
@futurebird I'm sure you could finish a tablet of text within a day, and I'm sure that would have been sufficiently fast.
I'm no expert but I imagine they were mainly writing down rules and taxes and things.
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@futurebird I'm sure you could finish a tablet of text within a day, and I'm sure that would have been sufficiently fast.
I'm no expert but I imagine they were mainly writing down rules and taxes and things.
@lydiaconwell
but not everyone could write— you might be very busy if you could. -
Do we know if people writing in cuneiform in clay with a stylus could write fast? Has anyone ever had a contest to see how fast people can write numbers that way (in sexagesimal obviously) ?
I think that if you try to do these things sometimes you make discoveries that just staring at a photo will never make evident.
found a better video! shows the palm-sized tablets moving to make the subtle angles of the strokes easy.
Also, a vid from Iraq, which seems more than fair!
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Do we know if people writing in cuneiform in clay with a stylus could write fast? Has anyone ever had a contest to see how fast people can write numbers that way (in sexagesimal obviously) ?
I think that if you try to do these things sometimes you make discoveries that just staring at a photo will never make evident.
@futurebird A speed texter with wedge shapes attached to their thumbs, holding the wet clay tablet like a phone
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F myrmepropagandist shared this topic
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Do we know if people writing in cuneiform in clay with a stylus could write fast? Has anyone ever had a contest to see how fast people can write numbers that way (in sexagesimal obviously) ?
I think that if you try to do these things sometimes you make discoveries that just staring at a photo will never make evident.
@futurebird this is not cuneiform at that point, but i know that for ancient romans, wax tablets were kinda the original post-it-note - scrap paper before scrap paper lol - so i wonder if wax you could get writing at a pretty good clip with, and then for a clay tablet (or especially a stone engraving...) you write it out more properly. i seem to remember some evidence that the babylonians did the same...?
we gotta get some people learning to write cuneiform so we can make them do Mavis Beacon Teaches Writing In Clay And-Or Wax and gather data for average performance. and as you can probably tell, that rapidly became less and less of a joke as i wrote that sentence
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Do we know if people writing in cuneiform in clay with a stylus could write fast? Has anyone ever had a contest to see how fast people can write numbers that way (in sexagesimal obviously) ?
I think that if you try to do these things sometimes you make discoveries that just staring at a photo will never make evident.
A side-comment:
I suspect—cuneiform aside—the dynamics of writing with a stylus were thoroughly explored at Palm in the 90s back when they were inventing Graffiti for the Apple Newton, another stylus-on-tablet writing system, this time hampered by trying to vaguely resemble upper/lowercase roman letters and arabic numerals.
Quite probably nobody has yet found the speed limit for that sort of text input. It'd be a useful field for computer research if not for multitouch.
