Artificial intelligence translates 5,000-year-old texts – 07/11/2023 – Marcelo Viana

An article published in the international press at the beginning of this month reports that researchers from Israel and Germany have developed an artificial intelligence algorithm capable of translating texts in cuneiform writing from the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, dating back to more than 5,000 years ago, into English.

Unlike Egypt, whose monumental achievements in stone have remained visible throughout history, Mesopotamia fell into a void of oblivion that spanned millennia. Until travelers’ curiosity was irresistibly drawn to the strange wedge-shaped (“cuneiform”) markings visible on numerous clay tablets found in the region.

By the beginning of the 18th century, there was no longer any doubt that it was a script, and the respective language had been associated with the Semitic language family, which includes Arabic and Hebrew among its living representatives.

A new scientific discipline was born, called Assyriology because most of the texts available at the time came from the Assyrian empire.

Shortly thereafter, in the 1820s, Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) would decipher the Rosetta Stone, giving rise to the sister discipline of Egyptology.

But Assyria was only the last great civilization to use cuneiform writing: successive excavations brought to light increasingly ancient texts, from Babylonia and Akkad, that used other Semitic languages, related to Assyrian.

And a fascinating work of deduction led researchers to intuit, and later confirm, the existence of an even older civilization, Sumer, at the time totally forgotten, which is believed today to have been the first, and perhaps the only, to discover the written independently, around 3500 BC

All of them used the cuneiform writing technique, which consisted of recording the characters using a stylus made of cane on wet clay tablets, which were then dried in the sun or even baked in an oven, if the importance of the document justified this care.

Much more durable than Egyptian papyri, clay tablets have come down to us in great numbers: it is estimated that there are more than a million in the possession of museums around the world, so many windows into our most remote history.

But even though we have deciphered all these languages, reading these documents, in complicated and often damaged scripts, was still a task within the reach of a few trained specialists. This totally changes with the arrival of the new algorithm.

I will continue next week.

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