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Dr Irving Finkel In 1985 a man called Douglas Simmonds brought a bag of miscellaneous antiquities to the British Museum for inspection. Dr Irving Finkel, the museum’s assistant keeper of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures, went through the curiosities and quickly discovered that one of them, a small Babylonian tablet covered in cuneiform (an ancient form of script) was a historical document of great significance. As an expert in Assyriology and cuneiform, Finkel only needed to read the first few lines of this small, craggy tablet to realise that this was a segment of an ancient Mespotamian myth, the...

Today's Assyriology scholars study Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets with the help of digital photographs or handwritten copies of the texts, but ideally, they visit collections to see the tablets firsthand. Technology could introduce a new way to connect researchers to these precious, unique artifacts by creating exact replicas. Such an effort is under way at Cornell in the lab of Hod Lipson, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, who specializes in the burgeoning field of 3-D scanning and printing of everyday objects. Natasha Gangjee '12, a student in Lipson's lab, worked with six cuneiform tablets to try and...