• Made corrections to the display of items K, P, and Q verso, and N side b.
  • Added a feature to rotate the tablet display 180º.
  • Added line numbers and a feature to be able to hide them.

I am adding another form of display. This tries to show the lines as they appear on the tablets, that is “bottom up” and reversed boustrophedon. The display is always as a single tablet side, with little to no space between lines. The purpose is to get a better idea of the general aspect of the tablet.

Please note that I say “try”. The way the lines are displayed is less then perfect, since the line graphics for a single tablet are often of uneven length. One reason for this is of course that the lines are sometimes of very different lengths. But other times this seems to be because the glyphs have been “normalized”, i.e, glyphs which are actually of uneven size are drawn to appear the same size. Because of this, this form of display does not faithfully render glyph adjacency on neighboring lines. The display is auto-generated, and all lines are centered, so in particular short lines can be very far from there correct location.

Considering these problems one might wonder: ‘Why bother?’. Despite the shortcomings I believe that this form of display is helpful. For one it is a reminder of how the lines are arrayed on the tablets. Also for some tablets it actually makes things clearer. This is most obvious with Items that are heavily damaged. For items M and T, Barthel’s graphics show the lines at roughly the same length, with the damaged sections indicated. Placing the lines next to each other gives a general impression of where the legible sections are located on the tablets. This is also the case for item H, where the damaged section covers several lines. On Item D the gash between lines 5 and 6 on side a, which gives the tablet its name (l’Échancrée), becomes clearly visible. Item F’s near circular shape—it is presumably a small shard of an originally larger item—becomes apparent.

A few items (O, V, J, L, X), where I found this form of display to be unhelpful, have been left out.

The svg pages for items U, V, W, X, and Y have been completed. Also since they have now been added to the XML corpus, the search function now covers the complete corpus.

Some points to note:

  • Since most of these items have only short lines, no line-wrapped pages were made.
  • Item W is not numbered, and not searchable.
  • Item X is problematic, as it is very unclear what the “lines” are. I have somewhat arbitrarily re-arranged the glyphs of lines 3, 5 and 6 onto single lines. This was done so that the glyphs could be included in the corpus, and the search facility. But reference should always be made back to the original scans for this item.
  • There are already many known errors (in particular on items A and I), so some searches return the wrong glyphs. These will have to be corrected.

Item S has been added.

S (Barthel)
S (Barthel), line-breaks
S (Fischer)
S (Fischer), line-breaks

Items Q, R and T have been added.

Q (Barthel)
Q (Barthel), line-breaks
Q (Fischer)
Q (Fischer), line-breaks

R (Barthel)
R (Barthel), line-breaks
R (Fischer)
R (Fischer), line-breaks

T (Barthel)
T (Barthel), line-breaks
T (Fischer)
T (Fischer), line-breaks

Glyph search now includes A-T (except S). The corpus file is 107MB.

Item P has been added.

P (Barthel)
P (Barthel), line-breaks
P (Fischer)
P (Fischer), line-breaks

Glyph search now includes A-P. The corpus file is 90MB.

Item O has been added.

O (Barthel)
O (Barthel), line-breaks
O (Fischer)
O (Fischer), line-breaks

Since the Barthel tracings of this tablet are so poor I have numbered things to match Fischer’s drawings better. Barthel’s lines are numbered 3-9 (rather than 1-7). Also I have updated the code numbers to match the glyph shapes that Fischer has recorded.

Items M has been added, and glyph search includes glyphs on items A-N.

M (Barthel)
M (Barthel), line-breaks
M (Fischer)
M (Fischer), line-breaks

Items H and N are now completed.

H (Barthel)
H (Barthel), line-breaks
H (Fischer)
H (Fischer), line-breaks

N (Barthel)
N (Barthel), line-breaks
N (Fischer)
N (Fischer), line-breaks

others things that have been fixed:

  • Numbering for the (strange) sequence 001.001-074 on line 5 of I has been fixed.
  • The last four glyphs of line Hv12 that were missing (from the scans) have been added.
  • A page for doing glyph searches has been added. This searches Items A – L only so far. The corpus file is however already 62MB so this is very slow. Something will have to be done about that.

I have uploaded svgs pages for the Santiago Staff. As before the glyphs are separated, and numbered. Again I have uploaded pages with whole, and wrapped lines.

However there is a big cautionary note; the lines on these pages are given in “Horley-order”, rather than the traditional order. So line 1 is the traditional “11”, 2 is “10” and so on. The last line 14 is the traditional “12.” This is the same order as Fischer backwards. Obviously I should have placed the traditional numbers in parenthesis (or something user-friendly like that), but these pages have been generated automagically, and doing such things would require that I edit them by hand. Surely anyone can do the calculation 14 – (n+2) modulo 14 in their head?