![]() Once these algorithms have learned to translate the sample texts into English, they will then automatically translate the other transliterated tablets. This makes them particularly suitable for automation. The wording in these administrative texts is simple: “11 nanny goats for the kitchen on the 15th day”, for example. The Sumerian word for big, for example, can be written in cuneiform signs, or it can be written in our alphabet as “gal”. ![]() Originally impressed into the clay with a reed stylus, the texts have already been transliterated into our alphabet by modern scholars. Each records transactions or deliveries of sheep, reed bundles or beer to a temple or an individual. Pagé-Perron and her team are training algorithms on a sample of 4,000 ancient administrative texts from a digitised database. ![]() The challenge is finding enough people who can read them. “We have more sources from Mesopotamia than we have from Greece, Rome and ancient Egypt together,” says Jacob Dahl, a professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford. Only some 10% of these have even been catalogued, let alone translated. For millennia, the people of Mesopotamia used seals made of engraved stone that were pressed into wet clay to mark doors, jars, tablets and other objects. “We have information about so many different aspects of the lives of Mesopotamian people, and we can’t really profit from the expertise of people in different fields like economics or politics, who if they had access to the sources, could help us tremendously to understand those societies better,” says Pagé-Perron.Īpart from the clay tablets, there are also more than 50,000 Mesopotamian engraved seals scattered in collections around the world. One of the aims is to open up the past to new research. Pagé-Perron is coordinating a project to machine translate 69,000 Mesopotamian administrative records from the 21st Century BC. But its texts are mainly written in Sumerian and Akkadian, languages that relatively few scholars can read. Mesopotamia gave us the wheel, astronomy, the 60-minute hour, maps, the story of the flood and the ark, and the first work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. “The influence that Mesopotamia has on our own culture is something that people don’t know much about,” says Émilie Pagé-Perron, a researcher in Assyriology at the University of Toronto. The aircraft designer who’s never flown.That could change thanks to a very modern helper: machine translation. Some 90% of cuneiform texts remain untranslated. However, since cuneiform was first deciphered by scholars around 150 years ago, the script has only yielded its secrets to a small group of people who can read it. An estimated half a million of them have been excavated, and more are still buried in the ground. They chronicle the rise of fall of Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia, the world’s first empires. From furious letters between warring royal siblings to rituals for soothing a fractious baby, the tablets offer a unique insight into a society at the dawn of history. These tiny signs are the remains of the world’s oldest writing system: cuneiform.ĭeveloped more than 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where modern-day Iraq now lies, cuneiform captured life in a complex and fascinating civilisation for some three millennia. Broken and scorched black by fire, the dense, wedge-shaped marks etched into the ancient clay tablets are only just visible under the soft light at the British Museum.
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