# No study has yet measured whether machine translation of Ur III texts changes the rate of archive reconstruction or…

> No study has yet measured whether machine translation of Ur III texts changes the rate of archive reconstruction or date assignment, so the claim that…

Source: https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/unread-cuneiform/evidence/EVD0DEDY55GJQF7/no-study-has-yet-measured-whether-machine-translation-of-ur  
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

# No study has yet measured whether machine translation of Ur III texts changes the rate of archive reconstruction or…

No study has yet measured whether machine translation of Ur III texts changes the rate of archive reconstruction or date assignment, so the claim that interpretation rather than translation limits reading is untested.

Speculative0

## 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[The backlog needs context, not translation](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/unread-cuneiform/answers/ANS0DEDW7V5CFDG/the-backlog-needs-context-not-translation)

Bears on1 for, none 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). No study has yet measured whether machine translation of Ur III texts changes the rate of archive reconstruction or… [Evidence EVD0DEDY55GJQF7]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDY55GJQF7
```

Key

**EVD** 0DEDY55GJQF7

Kind

Evidence

Tier

Speculative

Version

1

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