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It looks like he has not studied any Akkadian. He is apparently reliant on glosses by Assyriologist Jacob Dahl and presumably other translations.

From the introduction:

> Benjamin R. Foster, another esteemed academic author who has made significant contributions to the study and translation of the poem, [...] says, “I have no patience with clueless folk who think they can translate the epic without going to the trouble of mastering Babylonian.” This is a disheartening and discouraging comment. Are we really to accept that satisfactory transmissions of the Gilgamesh story rest entirely in the hands of professionals in the subject of Assyriology, or that the poem is located behind some kind of intellectual force field, or that those of us outside the inner circle must leave such profound work to the fellowship? And what of the counter argument: that the job of translating poetry cannot be fully realized by professors, only by poets?

> Echoing George and Foster to some extent, Michael Schmidt comments, “Interlopers achieve mixed results among the dead languages of the world.” Am I one such interloper, trespassing on hallowed ground? My approach to Gilgamesh has been the same as for my medieval translations, with the hope of producing critically informed work that speaks to the widest readership, attempting to balance linguistic and historical frameworks against literary expectations of the present day. The difference this time is that like almost everyone else on the planet I have no comprehension of Akkadian or other languages of the period, and for his thorough and no-nonsense translations of the cuneiform scripts I am indebted to Jacob L. Dahl, professor of Assyriology and fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, who provided me with the literals to work from. Jacob also answered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of my questions, some of them well below his pay grade, and stuck to the task for three or four more years beyond my wildly optimistic timeframe. I am enormously grateful to Jacob, for being a medium between this world and the world of the long dead, and for help in bringing them back to life. Any errors of judgment or rogue deviations between the files he submitted to me and the publication of this book are entirely of my making.

Martha Roth talks about one of the great benefits of working on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary being that scholars were, by necessity, exposed to a broad assortment of texts. The people who worked on the dictionary had a wide view of the entire culture that is virtually impossible to get today, especially as scholars are pressured to specialize more and more. (Roth, herself, specialized in ancient Mesopotamian law.)

Miguel Civil was probably the most famous example of this.

> no mention of this bieng an actual translation from the original sumerian

There are Sumerian Gilgamesh stories, but The Epic everyone reads is a redaction by the scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni of earlier works written in Standard Babylonian (Akkadian), not Sumerian.

I have a Withings sleep sensor. They recently sent me a marketing mail, based on my previous night’s sleep, with a pitch to improve my sleep through a paid program. I had already opted out of marketing emails so their unsubscribe link had nothing to unsubscribe from.

Is anyone doing scales, sleep sensors, and BP cuffs that don’t use the cloud at all?

It is odd here because the surviving records are so much better when you go even a little bit further in the past. Compare Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem under King Hezekiah a century or so earlier. We have Judah's side of things recorded in Isaiah, II Kings, and Chronicles. We have Sennacherib's side of things recorded in his royal annals. When Nebuchadnezzar II actually succeeded in conquering Jerusalem a century later, we just have the Bible.

That would be Amarna Letters 41-44.

A quotation from a letter sent by Ankhesenamun, Tutankhamun's widow, to Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I was found in Ḫattuša. Ankhesenamun asked Šuppiluliuma to send her one of her sons to marry her and become king of Egypt. Šuppiluliuma initially thinks this is a ruse, but the story eventually checks out and Šuppiluliuma sends a son. That son is killed on his journey and a war between Egypt and Ḫattuša ensues.

We're talking about a Levantine Iron Age text discussing Bronze Age peoples where civilization collapsed in the interim. In the case of Ḫattuša, the state archives were almost certainly unreadable by the time the Biblical texts were written, evidenced by the lack of any Hittite cuneiform texts being produced or copied in the Iron Age. Egypt and Mesopotamia maintained texts and the ability to read those texts across the collapse. The same cannot be said about Syria-Anatolia and the Levant.

That isn't to say that the Biblical texts can't reflect a memory passed on through oral tradition or knowledge from Mesopotamia and Egypt. But given that the geography of the Hittites of the Bible seems to line up more with the later "Neo-Hittite" Luwian-Arameans than Ḫattuša and that the Bible doesn't seem to be aware of the empire of Ḫattuša, the Biblical Hittites are probably not Ḫattuša.

I don't think that's the consensus. Even if it were the consensus, the I doubt the people making the argument would disagree that the Anatolian languages are closely related to the Indo-European languages. The grammar is classic Indo-European, with 7-9 cases depending on the period. The vocabulary has a lot of cognates with Indo-European languages. The only things that really distinguish Hittite from Indo-European languages are the system of enclitics and grammatical gender based on animacy rather than the usual masculine/feminine/neuter.

We've already seen this happen in the land of cuneiform. In the first millennium BCE, Akkadian cuneiform on tablets was replaced by Aramaic written on papyrus and vellum. The cuneiform survives in large quantity, the Aramaic barely at all. The Story of Aḥiqar, for example, comes from Mesopotamia and the only copy that survives in the original language somehow found its way to Elephantine in Egypt where the climate allowed it to (barely) survive. It puts Assyriologists in a weird position where there's plenty of textual documentation of earlier eras but far, far less in later eras. We're left with odd situations like the best documentation we have of Nebuchadnezzar II's reign coming from the Bible because the Bible got copied and the Babylonian texts that might provide a different emic perspective did not.

My Hittite language class went online during COVID and switched from studying royal annals to the Plague Prayers of Muršili II. One of the most enlightening parts of studying the ancient world is seeing that even in very alien cultures separated by millennia, we're all just people.

The Bible is not proper documentation of the Hittites. All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries. It's an open question whether the Hittites of the Bible refer to Ḫattuša or "Neo-Hittites" better described as Luwian-Aramean.

I was running a shell script that invoked cURL on a GL.iNet router at $DAYJOB. cURL was broken in this application with some inscrutable error that went away when I used stock openwrt.

If nurses are to do more of the work of physicians, nursing education needs to drastically change. Nurses are mostly taught the how of nursing and not the why of medicine. If you look at the curricula of DNP programs, which are often touted as a way to get nurses practicing with lots of autonomy in places where they are short on physicians, they're heavy on nonsense nursing theory and light on things that actually matter like pathophysiology and pharmacology.

We actually do have a better model in the form of physician assistants. They're taught the same kinds of things physicians are taught, just in less depth.

Half a million in debt is scary. Especially if you have any doubts that you can match and make it through residency at the end. It's even scarier if you come from a family making $50k/yr.

For those unaware, embedded devices usually have a "watchdog" timer that needs to be periodically reset ("fed"/"pet"/"kicked") when everything is operating correctly or else the device will reboot as a fail-safe.

This log message probably indicates when they're resetting the watchdog timer.