Related papers: The Number System of the Old European Script
Paleography is the study of ancient and historical handwriting, its key objectives include the dating of manuscripts and understanding the evolution of writing. Estimating when a document was written and tracing the development of scripts…
This study is based on Roman wooden force pumps. It appears that they were used in small numbers to raise water from wells, and more commonly as portable pumps to fight fires. The force pump is attributed to Ctesibius of Alexandria (fl.…
Sign Language is used to facilitate the communication between Deaf and non-Deaf people. It uses signs-words with basic structural elements such as handshape, parts of face, body or space, and the orientation of the fingers-palm. Sign…
This study presents a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer specifically designed for analyzing ancient Chinese scripts, focusing on the Chu bamboo slip (CBS) script used during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period (771-256…
This study explores the cryptic Voynich Manuscript, by looking for subtle signs of scribal intent hidden in overlooked features of the "Voynichese" script. The findings indicate that distributions of tokens within paragraphs vary…
The Ishango Bone is a prehistoric artifact dated to approximately 20,000 years ago, discovered near the Semliki River in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and has been the subject of scholarly debate for decades. The artifact…
In order to work with mathematical content in computer systems, it is necessary to represent it in formal languages. Ideally, these are supported by tools that verify the correctness of the content, allow computing with it, and produce…
Researchers continually perform corroborative tests to classify ancient historical documents based on the physical materials of their writing surfaces. However, these tests, often performed on-site, requires actual access to the manuscript…
Games potentially provide a wealth of knowledge about our shared cultural past and the development of human civilisation, but our understanding of early games is incomplete and often based on unreliable reconstructions. This paper describes…
Magic squares have always been and are still fascinating for many people, be it only because of their mathematical properties. Their origin is still but certain : we find no magic squares in Greece, and only a 3x3 one in China at the…
Constructing historical language models (LMs) plays a crucial role in aiding archaeological provenance studies and understanding ancient cultures. However, existing resources present major challenges for training effective LMs on historical…
We call an order type inscribable if it is realized by a point configuration where the extreme points are all on a circle. In this paper, we investigate inscribability of order types. We first show that every simple order type with at most…
The prehistoric site of Vin\u{c}a, on the right bank of the River Danube, the territory of the City of Belgrade, first excavated by Dr Miloje Vasi\'c; (1931-1934) provides Neolithic pottery dating back to 5200 - 4200 B.C. Shards excavated…
Four centuries before modern statistical linguistics was born, Leon Battista Alberti (1404--1472) compared the frequency of vowels in Latin poems and orations, making the first quantified observation of a stylistic difference ever. Using a…
Through the pagination of an Arabian Algerian manuscript of the beginning of the 19th century, we rediscover the original shape, the "Ghubari" shape, of the numerals. Contrary to some assumptions, particularly those which claim that they…
The Herculaneum Papyri are a collection of rolled papyrus documents that were charred and buried by the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They promise to contain a wealth of previously unseen Greek and Latin texts, but are extremely…
Finding the name of an unknown symbol is often hard, but writing the symbol is easy. This bachelor's thesis presents multiple systems that use the pen trajectory to classify handwritten symbols. Five preprocessing steps, one data…
Language endangerment is a phenomenon in which approximately 40% of languages spoken worldwide are predicted to disappear within the next few decades, resulting in the loss of cultures associated with these languages. To take effective…
The world runs on communicated sequences of symbols, e.g. numerals. Examining both engineered and natural communications networks reveals an unsuspected order that depends on contact with an unpredictable entity. This order has three roots.…
The remarkably long-standing problem of cryptography is to generate completely secure key. It is widely believed that the task cannot be achieved within classical cryptography. However, there is no proof in support of this belief. We…