Evidence · Unread cuneiform: half a million tablets and the limits of Sumerian
A first Sumerian machine-translation system for Ur III administrative transliterations produced translations its…
A first Sumerian machine-translation system for Ur III administrative transliterations produced translations its authors judged useful in quantitative and qualitative evaluation.
What it means
Key questionCan machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?
5 answers, none ahead yet
Openunchanged
Still possibleunchanged
Next steps 5
1
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
—not judged
2
Run the genre-transfer test of Akkadian NMT on Old Babylonian letters and Ur III texts.
~16 h
—not judged
3
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
—not judged
4
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
—not judged
Ranked by how likely each is to move the key question, for the time it takesAll 5 on the question
Sources 1
SRC
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). A first Sumerian machine-translation system for Ur III administrative transliterations produced translations its… [Evidence EVD0DEDXP3V2WH7]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDXP3V2WH7
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dedxp3v2wh7,
title = {A first Sumerian machine-translation system for Ur III administrative transliterations produced translations its…},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DEDXP3V2WH7},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDXP3V2WH7}
}