About Cuneiform
Cuneiform script is an ancient pictographic script, comparable to the Egyptian
hieroglyphs. The origin of cuneiform script is ancient Mesopotamia, which is now the
Republic of Iraq. At over 5000 years old, cuneiform script represents the oldest known
form of writing.
Cuneiform was inscribed into clay tablets using a stylus made from a small section of reed. The impressions produced by the reed were wedge shaped, and it is this distinctive wedge shape that lies at the etymological root of the writing style. The Latin word for 'wedge' is cuneus, so the wedge shaped characters are cuneiform.
The fragility and geographic dispersal of these ancient artefacts presents a problem for modern scholars, because there are many thousands of fragments located in hundreds of collections. The fragments from a single tablet may be dispersed across several collections, with some tablets being substantially incomplete and some fragments being completely orphaned from their original tablet.
About MARA-3D
The manual reconstruction of collected cuneiform tablets would require significant international effort, and would take many years to complete. Many collections use hand drawn paper documentation as their primary storage medium, and in some cases large collections remain entirely un-catalogued after almost a century of storage.
The aim of the MARA-3D project is to address these problems by developing new techniques for co-operative interaction and archaeometric analysis in 3D. The project deals with the manual and automatic reconstruction of cuneiform from a computational and HCI standpoint, applying open-source and open-hardware methodologies.