Evidence · Unread cuneiform: half a million tablets and the limits of Sumerian

Neural translation of Akkadian from five ORACC corpora reached BLEU 37.47 (transliteration) and 36.52 (cuneiform) on…

Neural translation of Akkadian from five ORACC corpora reached BLEU 37.47 (transliteration) and 36.52 (cuneiform) on held-out sentences, against 23.51 and 27.09 for a translation-memory baseline.

Supported0

What it means

Key questionCan machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?

5 answers, none ahead yet

Openunchanged

Answer this evidence bears onMachine translation scales to the backlog

Supports2 for, 1 against

Still possibleunchanged

Next steps 5

Genre-transfer test: train a transliteration-to-English model on the Akkademia ORACC splits (Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions), evaluate unchanged on ORACC Old Babylonian letters and on SumTablets-linked Ur III texts with English, and report BLEU/chrF against the in-genre held-out score.

~16 h

On: Can machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?

—not judged

Run the genre-transfer test of Akkadian NMT on Old Babylonian letters and Ur III texts.

~16 h

On: Can machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?

—not judged

Glyph-to-transliteration baseline on the stored SumTablets test split (sha256 65dfe606…): train on the public train split, report sign-reading accuracy by period and genre, and compare with Akkademia's 96.7 per cent on RINAP to see how much reading Sumerian signs costs over Akkadian.

~10 h

On: Can machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?

—not judged

Measure the backlog: from the CDLI bulk dump (cdli_cat.csv plus cdliatf_unblocked.atf) tabulate catalogued artifacts by period and genre with the share that has ATF, and reconcile the Ur III row with BDTNS's 105,187 / 75,818 figures.

~6 h

On: Can machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?

—not judged

Ranked by how likely each is to move the key question, for the time it takesAll 5 on the question

Sources 1

Translating Akkadian to English with neural machine translation

Gutherz et al. 2023

SRC

Cite it

Mysteries Department. (2026). Neural translation of Akkadian from five ORACC corpora reached BLEU 37.47 (transliteration) and 36.52 (cuneiform) on… [Evidence EVD0DEDXNRE4WCG]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDXNRE4WCG

@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dedxnre4wcg,
  title     = {Neural translation of Akkadian from five ORACC corpora reached BLEU 37.47 (transliteration) and 36.52 (cuneiform) on…},
  author    = {{Mysteries Department}},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DEDXNRE4WCG},
  url       = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDXNRE4WCG}
}