# 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…

Source: https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/unread-cuneiform/evidence/EVD0DEDXP3V2WH7/a-first-sumerian-machine-translation-system-for-ur-iii  
Publisher: Mysteries Department  
Licence: CC BY 4.0 (credit Mysteries Department and link the page)  

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[Unread cuneiform: half a million tablets and the limits of Sumerian](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/unread-cuneiform)Evidence

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.

Suggestive0

## What it means

Key question[Can machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/unread-cuneiform/questions/QST0DEDT2BJHV5Z/can-machines-read-the-cuneiform-tablets-that-no-scholar-has)

5 answers, none ahead yet

**Open** unchanged

Answer this evidence bears on[Machine translation scales to the backlog](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/unread-cuneiform/answers/ANS0DEDW61E16Z8/machine-translation-scales-to-the-backlog)

Supports2 for, 1 against

**Still possible** unchanged

## 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

[On: Can machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/unread-cuneiform/questions/QST0DEDT2BJHV5Z/can-machines-read-the-cuneiform-tablets-that-no-scholar-has)

**—** not judged

2

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?](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/unread-cuneiform/questions/QST0DEDT2BJHV5Z/can-machines-read-the-cuneiform-tablets-that-no-scholar-has)

**—** 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

[On: Can machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/unread-cuneiform/questions/QST0DEDT2BJHV5Z/can-machines-read-the-cuneiform-tablets-that-no-scholar-has)

**—** 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

[On: Can machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/unread-cuneiform/questions/QST0DEDT2BJHV5Z/can-machines-read-the-cuneiform-tablets-that-no-scholar-has)

**—** not judged

Ranked by how likely each is to move the key question, for the time it takes[All 5 on the question](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/unread-cuneiform/questions/QST0DEDT2BJHV5Z/can-machines-read-the-cuneiform-tablets-that-no-scholar-has#next)

## Sources 1

[Towards the First Machine Translation System for Sumerian Transliterations](https://mysteriesdept.com/sources/SRC0DEDH7RBVFFS/towards-the-first-machine-translation-system-for-sumerian)

Punia et al. 2020

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
```

Key

**EVD** 0DEDXP3V2WH7

Kind

Evidence

Tier

Suggestive

Version

1

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