Digital Hammurabi - High Resolution 3D Imaging of Cuneiform Tablets Johns Hopkins University NSF Award number: 0205586 Amount: $1,628,346 (for 3 years) Abstract (written by NSF) This proposal is concerned with developing of 3-D scanning methods to be applied to the imaging of cuneiform tablets. This process can make the tablets more readable by "deepening" the marks in tablets badly worn over centuries, thus sharpening the images. The panel gave this proposal a Highly Competitive rating, noting that it was an excellent proposal with innovative work in information technology and the humanities and social sciences. For IT, the impact is the development of a portable, very high resolution surface scanner and the multi-resolution algorithms. For the humanities, the project represents significant work with a potentially very wide application to other other objects with the result of opening up new fields of study to a larger group of scholars. The technology and techniques developed can be imported to other areas of study of ancient cultures and languages. [Excerpted from the Digital Hammurabi grant proposal to the Information Technology Research program of the National Science Foundation, November 1, 2001.] Project Summary Cuneiform is the worldŐs oldest known writing system. The earliest texts appear in Mesopotamia around 3200 B.C., and the last native cuneiform texts were written around 75 A.D. Since the decipherment of Babylonian cuneiform some 150 years ago, museums have accumulated hundreds of thousands of tablets, written in most of the major languages of the Ancient Near East - Sumerian, Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian), Eblaite, Hittite, Persian, Hurrian, Elamite, and Ugaritic. These texts include genres as variegated as mythology and mathematics, law codes and beer recipes. In most cases these documents are the earliest exemplars of their genres, and cuneiformists have been able to make unique and valuable contributions to the study of such modern disciplines as history, linguistics, mathematics and science. In spite of continued great interest in mankindŐs earliest documents only about 1/10 of the extant cuneiform texts have been read even once in modern times. There are various reasons for this: the script system itself is inherently difficult to learn and there is no standard computer encoding for cuneiform yet; there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world; in many cases the pedagogical tools are non-optimal; access to the widely distributed tablets is expensive, time-consuming, and, due to the vagaries of politics, increasingly difficult. We will develop new, higher resolution 3D scanning hardware, better and faster computer algorithms for 3D imaging, a Unicode-based standard computer encoding for cuneiform text, and a petabyte size digital library capable of delivering it all to researchers over the Internet via cross-platform client-server web browser software. Scholars will be able to select tablets from cuneiform digital library databases for downloading to their local computers. There they will pan, tilt, rotate and magnify these virtual tablets. They will have full control over lighting and shading of the tablets. They can print optimized views of the tablets for publication. They can integrate the images and texts of the tablets into other software research environments. Students will learn cuneiform by working with accurate models of the tablets produced by 3D printers or milling machines from the 3D models. Automated 3D character recognition will make thousands of unread tablets available for further research. An international standard computer encoding for cuneiform will open up new avenues of computer aided textual analysis. This "virtual autopsy" of cuneiform tablets will revolutionize cuneiform studies, not only by making the world's tablet collections broadly available, but also by limiting physical contact with these valuable and unique ancient artifacts, while at the same time providing redundant archival copies of the originals. It will have the happy side effect of dramatically reducing the need for expensive travel grants. Specific long-term goals of the Digital Hammurabi project include: * production of a portable, very high resolution 3D surface scanner that can scan all facets of a cuneiform tablet in under a minute at 10 micrometer resolution (at least 4 times finer than current resolutions) * development of cross-platform software to stitch gigabytes of raw data together into coherent, virtual tablets for optimal real-time rendering and manipulation over the network via new multi-resolution algorithms, shape-on-shape imaging, and shadow generation * establishment of a leading international digital library with a petabyte scale archive of virtual 3D cuneiform tablets processed for rapid Internet2 delivery Though the full realization of these goals will take several years, our thrust for the next three years is to develop a working high resolution scanner, computer algorithms for multi-resolution rendering of 3D tablets, and the beginnings of the digital library infrastructure to support an accumulating archive.