everettf

http://mordochai.tripod.com/vat4956.html#top
I was looking at this tablet and I started to wonder. How were they written on? chiseled? was the slab poured? was it semi-soft? When I looked at the space between letters, I didn't see tool marks. Can anybody tell me how it was done?

Atheos

I'm trying to figure out what you're talking about. I looked at the link and there are no images of artifacts. Actually there aren't any images of anything unless you count the advertisements he says to ignore at the top and bottom of the page. Did you possibly post an incorrect link?

S.C.Carlson

It's cuneiform writing. The marks were formed by pushing a triangular-shaped reed into soft clay. Then, the clay tablet was fired to make it hard.

Malachi151

I have always been amazed that printing was not developed earlier. All they had to do was push more clay onto this, then fire it, then use it as a mold to make as many copies as they wanted.

Clivedurdle

Aren't coins "printed"?

Hex

The usual term is 'minted'.

Coins in antiquity were often no more than 'slugs' of a metal put onto a inverse mold on an anvil, another inverse is put atop them and the thing is struck. I beleive that there were some hammers that were made with the inverse on the striking face to speed the process (but I don't have a citation right now).

Hex

*OR*

Dip the tablet face in ink and lay some fabric/smoothed hide over it to get the 'raised' impressions.

Perhaps they did and we simply haven't had any survive? Or, the libraries wanted to make sure that nobody took out more than their allowance and hence kept them heavy ... :Cheeky:

jgibson000

Lugging around copies that would be backwardly "typefaced" and "in Braille"?

JG

everettf

Thank you, that's what I wanted to know.

everettf

That would be a mirror image. They would have to have it etched in a mirror image.

Maybe it is and archaeologists never thought about it.