
Origami Around
noise dept.
h
sheepfilms
todays bird
art blog(derogatory)
Not today Justin
Peter Solarz
Claire Keane

if i look back, i am lost
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Xuebing Du
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

Love Begins
Sade Olutola
Mike Driver
dirt enthusiast

#extradirty
will byers stan first human second
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
seen from Singapore
seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Japan
seen from United States
seen from Germany

seen from United States

seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Belgium
seen from United States

seen from Portugal
seen from United States
@freshsneezes
🎵 yes we coela-can 🎶
someone gave me a guava and this is how it felt
got called a weirdly gender-affirming slur last friday
Hello! I was wondering if you had any tips for using cuneiform as an art inspiration? One of my friends is super into cuneiform and birds, so I wanted to kind of write the cuneiform for "corvid" using stylised triangular crows.
Feel free to ignore this, it's a pretty involved ask!
I had a look at the Assyrian Languages website, and it spat out
but there's so many options! Why is the translation given as "erebu" without the cuneiform, then followed by the other words "uga" and "buru", which do have cuneiform?
And are there rules for rearranging the different units of the word? Is it like English, where you can't really split the letters of a word up, because it won't make sense?
I also double-checked the translation with the the Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, which you linked a couple posts ago, and they match, but there isn't any cuneiform in the dictionary.
Thank you for reading this far!
Okay, buckle up for a ride!
Akkadian is a Semitic language with a weird, cobbled-together writing system. It's a bit like a rebus: we can figure out that "👁️ ❤️ 🐑" means "I love you," because "eye" sounds like "I," hearts connote love, and a female sheep is a ewe, which sounds like "you." Likewise, a given cuneiform sign can be one of three things: a syllabogram (representing the sound of particular syllables, like 👁️), a logogram (representing a particular idea, like ❤️); or a determinative (representing a category of ideas, like "Dr."). In many cases, a given sign could be any one of those, depending on context. As a result, there are many possible ways to spell most words—although certain sign combinations tend to get standardized in a particular place and time.
In this case, "UGA" is the logogram for a corvid, and "MUŠEN" is the determinative for a bird. So one way to write "a crow" (literally "a crow-bird") would be to combine the signs for UGA and MUŠEN. (MUL is the determinative for an astral body, so if you were trying to say "the crow-planet," you could write it as "star-crow-bird," or "MUL.UGA.MUŠEN."). And yes, the order does matter in most cases; I wouldn't rearrange them.
But! Instead of writing something logographically, you could "spell it out" using syllabograms. So the word erēbu/arēbu, which is what "crow" would have sounded like, can be broken down into syllables and spelled that way, e.g. a-re/ri-bu. When the Epic of Gilgamesh describes sending out a raven as part of the Flood story, it spells it as "a-ri-bu." (Well, technically a-ri-ba/a-ri-bi, because those are the declined forms.)
The simplest two options that appear in the corpus, then, are UGA or BURU4 ("crow" without the "bird" determinative, which is optional) or a-ri-bu. Here's what those look like, using two different potential writing styles: Old Babylonian (an earlier and more complex writing system) and Neo-Assyrian (a more rectilinear, streamlined, later writing system):
As you can see, UGA is a very complicated sign, so I would recommend choosing either BURU4 or a-ri-bu. I find Neo-Assyrian much easier to reproduce, but the choice of writing system is up to you.
I hope this helps. Send me a picture of what you produce; it sounds so fun!
Thank you for the super detailed answer!
I finally got around to drawing this like eight months later. I went for Neo-Assyrian aribu as the easiest :)
what if autism creature but cow
(because of temple grandin, photo ref from here)
(she's really cool, she made a "squeeze machine" for sensory reasons after she spent time on her aunt's farm with the cattle, and now campaigns for animal welfare)
kinda late to the trend but here's hk miku on the mtr
(mtr bg from wikimedia)
Hello this a long shot call, am a citizen of Palestine. I am here to request for your support to help get my insulin, I was diagnosised with type 1 diabetes and due to current situation in Gaza I'm unable to get my insulin injection as a result I'm here begging for little financial support to help me purchase insulin for this week.My donation link is available on my pinned post
.
an itty bitty guy! only 1m tall
also an endangered guy! [Asian Wild Cattle Specialist Group]
inspired by @bovineblogger's tamaraw tuesday posts
deliciously rude answers to an unpleasant question
happy solarpunk aesthetic week y'all
i miss the sun
the stars have been looking a little different lately