These describe scanning of ancient clay tablets, for archival and information retrieval purposes. Note that the Johns Hopkins research on archiving is from 2003. I suspect the blocker may be money, rather than practicality; these aren't simple flatbed scanners, the tables must be scanned in 3D to recover the full detail required. But, it's an incredibly fascinating area of research to read about.
I'd hardly say impossible. It's being done, today. See this article:https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/sonstiges/meldungen/detail/a... or these papers: http://pages.jh.edu/~dighamm/version2/research/2003_10_digit... and https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cuneiform/cuneiform-300...
These describe scanning of ancient clay tablets, for archival and information retrieval purposes. Note that the Johns Hopkins research on archiving is from 2003. I suspect the blocker may be money, rather than practicality; these aren't simple flatbed scanners, the tables must be scanned in 3D to recover the full detail required. But, it's an incredibly fascinating area of research to read about.
EDIT - So, I did some more reading, and it seems that the Johns Hopkins work I referenced above is part of The Digital Hammurabi Project which is doing exactly this, archiving cuneiform tablets, described here: http://pages.jh.edu/~dighamm/version2/research/2003_03_Museu... with more information on the projects website: http://www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/