How
amazing is the transmission of information through time, connecting
the distant past to the present moment. Ancient civilizations
experimented diverse types of material such as baked clay tablets,
papyrus, stones and so forth, as data. Some part of those data would
survive through time and space, but a massive part would be lost
forever. The access to all those information would be impossible
without the work of some people, those people who left the data with
precious information; and those people who would be able to interpret
those data and access the information, in a remote future. The Epic
of Gilgamesh and Princess Enheduanna`s poems are examples of data
registered in baked clay; and The Rosetta Stone, an example of data
registered in black granite stone.
The
Epic of Gilgamesh, considered the oldest registered data of human
history was written in backed clay tablets, it is an epic poem from
ancient Mesopotamia, each tablet contains the story of a single
adventure of Gilgamesh.
Princess
Enheduanna from the City of Ur, left a corpus of literary works and
many personal devotions to the goddess Inanna and a collection of
hymns known as the “Sumerian Temple Hymns”, in backed clay
tablets. She is considered as one of the earliest author and poets
known by name in world history. She composed 42 hymns addressed to
temples across Sumer and Akkad and the texts are reconstructed from
37 tablets from Ur and Nippur.
The
Rosetta Stone, perhaps seen as simply a weird black granite stone
with some curious signals written in it. Actually, it was an
essential data which holds information about the ancient Egyptian
civilization, and in 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion, a brilliant
young Frenchman, who was a scholar, a philologist, an orientalist and
a professor in Egyptology, the secrets of ancient Egyptians begun to
be revealed. He showed that the Egyptian writing system was a
combination of phonetic and ideographic signs. The Rosetta Stone has
a message in three inscriptions: 1) Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; 2)
Egyptian demotic script; 3) Ancient Greek. The message is a decree
issued at Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC on behalf of king Ptolemy V. The
translation was the essential key to modern understanding of Ancient
Egyptian literature and civilization.
The
secrets of those mysterious
civilizations
were uncovered
through space and time. It
shows that the power of
information is an essential
tool used by scholars
to scrutinize the data
available. Ancient
civilizations
were
interested to transmit
informations
about their glory to the future generations. But
how much secret still hide to us because it was lost? How
many civilizations
has existed
and suddenly has
perished without
leaving at least a trace
as a key to
open the door to their
mysteries? How
many undeciphered
symbol we have encountered
and yet we cannot revel them
because we
have limited understanding of
how access them?
In
a time where the access of
information resources were very
limited. Time
completely different from our
modern time where we have the
net and computers,
people like Champollion would
interpret the data left by the
ancient Egyptians. Without
internet, without computer. How such
an amazing mind! The
capability to
understand the meaning of a
message written a long time ago and
transmitted through
space and time, is
really amazing.
I
think that everything that exist, for instance, human Beings,
planets, stars, black holes and so forth, can be seen as types of
data holding information. Some of those data are much more complexes
than others. The world is an infinite metadata, holding the data
about data of everything.
