What survives, what is translated, what remains unknown
A factual checklist for keeping document history and translation work measurable.
A work is not a tablet
A literary work can survive in multiple copies and fragments. A tablet can contain an excerpt or more than one text. Count work titles, physical objects, fragments, joins and editions in separate columns. A modern composite can combine witnesses that never existed together on one intact ancient object.
Four dates to keep separate
Record a proposed composition date, a surviving copy’s date, the date of its excavation or acquisition, and the modern edition’s publication date. Put the evidence and uncertainty beside each. A museum object dated to one century does not automatically establish the first composition date of the work it preserves.
Four different unfinished states
Unidentified: a label has no exact document reference. Access pending: an edition exists but has not been obtained. Translation not verified: the present search has not located a translation for the specified surviving text. Physically missing: signs or material do not survive. None of these statuses should silently replace another.
Nippur is a worked identification problem
Penn Museum’s CBS10673, joining CBS10867, preserves the Sumerian flood story. Wasserman also edits Akkadian CBS13532 as a Nippur flood witness, Ms. J. English translations exist for both. The source list’s generic title does not decide between them, and the Sumerian candidate overlaps the Eridu Genesis entry.
Do not invent a percentage
A translation coverage percentage requires a defined denominator: which work, witnesses and surviving lines are included? State how variants, duplicate fragments and undecipherable signs are counted. This review has not completed that census for the Astronomical Diaries, Sefer Yetzirah manuscripts or all cuneiform tablets. Their global untranslated totals remain unknown.
Record a claim another reader can check
Save the work title, object or witness identifier, edition, translator, exact location, access link, what was reviewed and what remains unresolved. Quote only the necessary permitted passage. A modern interpretation belongs in a separately labelled record; it is not part of the ancient document’s wording.