cuneiform

To this day, my notes look like something between cuneiform and the lines from furniture on wooden floors after decades of wear and tear.

"Up until now it has been difficult to access the content of many cuneiform tablets at once -- you sort of need to know exactly what you are looking for and where," Mara adds.

"OCR usually works with photographs or scans. This is no problem for ink on paper or parchment. In the case of cuneiform tablets, however, things are more difficult because the light and the viewing angle greatly influence how well certain characters can be identified," explains Ernst Stötzner from MLU.

In their new approach, the researchers used 3D models of nearly 2,000 cuneiform tablets, including around 50 from a collection at MLU.

This is because the cuneiform tablets are unfired chunks of clay into which writing has been pressed.