Researchers use AI to translate texts from 5,000 years ago into forgotten language; and the machine understands better decrees than poems
The oldest known writing system is the cuneiform, invented in Mesopotamia by the Sumerians in the 4th millennium B.C. (a millennium before the Egyptian hieroglyphs) to write on clay tablets with punch or chisel (no paper and papyrus). Over the time it was in use (until the 1st century AD) it evolved from an ideographic system to a phonetic (syllabic) and underwent variations to adapt to the different languages that adopted it as their own, most of them unrelated to each other. This meant that the advances achieved in the translation of certain tablets could not always be applied to those found on other sites. Add to that the low availability of experts in such ancient and minority languages and you will have hundreds of thousands of boards in your hands waiting to be slowly translated. Most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their large number and limited number of experts able to read them. That’s until artificial intelligence is used to lend a h...
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