QuestionsUnread cuneiform: half a million tablets and the limits of SumerianCan machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?Answer
Answer · Unread cuneiform: half a million tablets and the limits of Sumerian
Machine translation scales to the backlog
Neural machine translation already gives usable drafts for well-edited genres and will scale to the unread backlog as training data grows.
Where it stands
Still possibleTwo pieces of evidence for, one against. It needs two reviews to be accepted.
What it predicts
- A model trained on Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions, applied to Old Babylonian letters or Ur III accounts with no fine-tuning, keeps most of its BLEU score.
- BLEU on a genuinely unpublished test set transliterated after the fact is within a few points of the published held-out score.
What would rule it out
- Cross-genre BLEU falls below the translation-memory baseline.
- Expert review of translations of unpublished tablets finds that most contain at least one hallucinated clause.
Evidence 2 for · 1 against
FOR
The questions it answers
Open5 answers, none ahead
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Machine translation scales to the backlog [Answer ANS0DEDW61E16Z8]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/ANS0DEDW61E16Z8
@misc{mysteriesdept_ans0dedw61e16z8,
title = {Machine translation scales to the backlog},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Answer, catalog key ANS0DEDW61E16Z8},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/ANS0DEDW61E16Z8}
}