[parsabg]

I'm a big fan of the Vesuvius challenge (and Graeco-Roman history/philosophy) but I'm not convinced if the effort justifies the reward here, relative to other pockets of ancient writings we can use technology for reading and archiving.

We have large volumes of clay tablets from Mesopotamia that pre-date these papyri and are considerably easier to read that get nowhere near the attention. E.g. the library of Ashurbanipal.

Several reasons are at play I suppose - the excitement and the drama are much higher with this. But I think the West's obsession with the Graeco-Roman world is also a major factor.

[verditelabs]

You'd probably like the Deep Past Challenge then: https://www.deeppast.org/

We are not associated with them, but they're a team of scholars that hosted an open challenge to do automated translation of Akkadian texts. Their first competition ended a few months ago but I believe they plan on hosting another at some point focused on doing image recognition to help speed up the transcription and translation of the tablets that you mentioned.

[parsabg]

Great that this exists, and a shame that it'll probably never get a similar level of attention from funders, participants, or the press.

[dcminter]

Why not both?

But that said, my understanding, very likely wrong, was that those were mostly tax records and other lists - which don't fire my imagination in quite the same way as works of philosophy and literature snatched (almost literally) from the flames of history.

Now, why should I be more interested in the mesopotamian tablets? (Not sarcasm, I'm interested)

[parsabg]

It is true that a large portion of the tablets are probably going to be boring (bills, records, etc). But we mustn't forget that the tablets we have excavated and translated so far have given us gems like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the writings of Enheduanna - the ancient Sumerian princess and the first named author in the history of humanity.

Remarkably, these figures and their writings, dating from ~2300 BC, were as distant from Julius Caesar as he is to us, and yet they played a major role in shaping our world, for instance by setting the early foundations for Judeo-Christian thinking (examples: the flood story, Enheduanna's laments, etc). So we have every reason to be interested in them.

It would, of course, be great to do both. But my point is that it is going to be much harder to attract funders, participants, press coverage, and so on for reading Mesopotamian tablets than for reading Greek or Roman papyri excavated from Piso’s villa in Herculaneum.