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This study presents 32 high-resolution geomagnetic intensity data points from Mesopotamia, spanning the 3rd to the 1st millennia BCE. These data contribute to rectifying geographic disparities in the resolution of the global archaeointensity curve that have hampered our understanding of geomagnetic field dynamics and the viability of applying archaeomagnetism as a method of absolute dating of archaeological objects. A lack of precise and well-dated intensity data in the region has also limited our ability to identify short-term fluctuations in the geomagnetic field, such as the Levantine Iron Age geomagnetic Anomaly (LIAA), a period of high field intensity from ca. 1050 to 550 BCE. This phenomenon has hitherto not been well-demonstrated in Mesopotamia, contrary to predictions from regional geomagnetic models. To address these issues, this study presents precise archaeomagnetic results from 32 inscribed baked bricks, tightly dated to the reigns of 12 Mesopotamian kings through interpretation of their inscriptions. Results confirm the presence of the high field values of the LIAA in Mesopotamia during the first millennium BCE and drastically increase the resolution of the archaeointensity curve for the 3rd-1st millennia BCE. This research establishes a baseline for the use of archaeomagnetic analysis as an absolute dating technique for archaeological materials from Mesopotamia.

Imagine a student reading Odysseus' Cretan tale at Odyssey 19.172–84. When faced by a string of unfamiliar names – in addition to 'native Cretans', there are Achaeans, Cydonians and Dorians, as well as the individuals Minos, Deucalion, Idomeneus and the speaker, Aethon (Odysseus in disguise) –, they use their digital edition to find out more about each of these people and their places of origin. A personal name opens an online encyclopaedia entry, while clicking on a place launches an emerging world beyond the single text – an online atlas that provides information about the place's toponymy, form and exact location as well as links to other resources (textual and archaeological, ancient and modern) about this place, including those to which our student has contributed. The year? 2023 (Figure 1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classification of cuneiform signs according to stylistic criteria is a difficult task, which often leaves experts in the field disagree. This study introduces a new publicly available dataset of cuneiform signs classified according to style and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) approaches to differentiate between cuneiform signs of the two main styles of the first millennium bce, Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian. The CNN model reaches an accuracy of 83 % in style classification. This tool has potential implications for the recognition of individual scribes and the dating of undated cuneiform tablets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vital part of the publication process of ancient cuneiform tablets is creating hand-copies, which are 2D line art representations of the 3D cuneiform clay tablets, created manually by scholars. This research provides an innovative method using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to identify strokes, the constituent parts of cuneiform characters, and display them as vectors — semi-automatically creating cuneiform hand-copies. This is a major step in optical character recognition (OCR) for cuneiform texts, which would contribute significantly to their digitization and create efficient tools for dealing with the unique challenges of Mesopotamian cultural heritage. Our research has resulted in the successful identification of horizontal strokes in 2D images of cuneiform tablets, some of them from very different periods, separated by hundreds of years from each other. With the Detecto algorithm, we achieved an F-measure of 81.7% and an accuracy of 90.5%. The data and code of the project are available on GitHub. An innovative approach towards cuneiform OCR of identifying strokes instead of signs offers insight into the challenges and methodologies of quantitative epigraphy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hittite Logograms and Hittite Scholarship. By Mark Weeden. Studien zu den Bogazkoy-Texten, vol. 54. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011. Pp. xvii + 693. 128 [euro]. A comprehensive study dedicated to Akkadian [...]