Tablet

A broken cuneiform archive is on your desk, and the only tool is a lamp. The wedges are real height-field relief: rake the light across the clay until they resolve into signs — too high and the surface goes dead, too low and it drowns. Twelve tablets escalate from a six-sign school list to a damaged lament in three pieces. Join fragments by break edge, ruling and scribal hand, then decipher. Signs are polyvalent, so there is no key — only hypotheses tested against an attested lexicon and the fixed shape of a genre. A wrong reading gives you plausible nonsense; a right one lets someone speak.