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The original was posted on /r/askhistorians by /u/Cautious_Force_8496 on 2023-07-18 00:29:30+00:00.
(Repost because my original submission didn’t have a question in the title and I couldn’t edit the title)
I am reading the book “Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet” and came across a passage that says:
“The historical development of the cuneiform script which occupies scholars so much today also fascinated the ancient scribes. The collections from Babylon contain many late copies of early historical inscriptions or legal texts made in the seventh or sixth century BC by scribes who had found the originals in temples, private collections, or even on rubbish dumps and who had faithfully copied the curious styles of early writing. Among the Neo-Assyrian tablets from Kaleidoscope there is a small group of tablets on which the scribes have drawn archaic signs such as might have been typical of the mid-third millennium BC and annotated them with their modern equivalent, i.e. their Neo-Assyrian equivalent. A century later we find that the archaeologist king Nabonidus, who boasted of finding inscriptions of Hammurapi at Larsa and of excavating for inscriptions of Sargon I and Naram-Sin at Akkad, had some of his own royal bricks and cylinders stamped or inscribed in a script which attempts to imitate the Old Babylonian style.” (Reading the Past, 1990, page 28-30)
As an archaeology student, I am fascinated by the idea of these ancient archaeologists. What more do we know about them, and do we have evidence of people doing anything similar elsewhere?