black rain floods the downs

Via a friend, via tumblr; an original news piece:

In 2006, archaeologists working at Shahr-e Sūkhté in southeastern Iran found what appears to be a ~5000-year-old prosthetic eye, engraved and gilded to look like the sun.

“[The eye] has a hemispherical form and a diameter of just over 2.5 cm (1 inch). It consists of very light material, probably bitumen paste. The surface of the artificial eye is covered with a thin layer of gold, engraved with a central circle (representing the iris) and gold lines patterned like sun rays. The female remains found with the artificial eye was 1.82 m tall (6 feet), much taller than ordinary women of her time. On both sides of the eye are drilled tiny holes, through which a golden thread could hold the eyeball in place. Since microscopic research has shown that the eye socket showed clear imprints of the golden thread, the eyeball must have been worn during her lifetime. The woman’s skeleton has been dated to between 2900 and 2800 BCE.” (Text looks to come from Wikipedia; I don’t know the image’s provenance.)

I want to write her a story.

In other news, I have finally begun my Old Babylonian (Akkadian) assignment, which is due next Wednesday. I hope to split it into pieces, doing a bit each night until it’s complete. Tonight I transliterated some cuneiform. There’s a marker used for determinative signs – +D – that I keep reading as a smiley. Thus is my generation wracked upon the shores of the internet.

And I am developing an itch to learn Linear B.