> houses around 130,000 clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia > Since so few scholars can read the languages on the tablets—the overwhelming majority remain untranslated
This would be an awesome job for AI. Get these scholars to train the AI, then have it automatically translate all the other tablets
Also, are there online scans of the tablets? Maybe the problem is not the scarcity of scholars, but gatekeeping?
On a tangent:
> These tablets, which likely come from Sippar, a Babylonian city in modern Iraq, were acquired by the museum more than a century ago and date to between 1900 and 1600 B.C.
Is "acquired" a euphemism for stolen here?
> Get these scholars to train the AI, then have it automatically translate all the other tablets
Which is great until it blithely translates an ancient curse and initiates the apocalypse.
Klaatu barada... necktie... neckturn... nickle... noodle... It's an N word, definitely an N word.
That's not a curse, that's a 'stand down' instruction. I would be much happier to see that, than, say, "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn".
Unless as protection against hacking attempts at issuing the stand down command initiates a curse. After 3 attempts at the phrase, you must wait 30 seconds before your next attempt. After 5 attempts, you are personally frozen. After 10 attempts, all stand down instructions are wiped and the world is screwed at that point.
You mean that hasn't already happened? What the hell is going on then?
Just the usual stuff, unfortunately.
Given how chaotic people are, it's remarkable that millions of us working together isn't invariably a constant raging dumpster fire, and instead is only a bit of smoke here and there that sometimes flares up a bit.
That's very true. As a child, I was confused by all the chaos. Adults seemed to know everything, and yet there was constant war and famine and dysfunction all over the world. As an adult, I'm confused by the fact that anything works at all.
Don't worry, you're still confused: nothing does :P
That's a relief! No, wait!
'Dysfunctionally functional' is probably a term that I read elsewhere. It's almost a curse because if things were to fully break, then everyone on earth would consider that a sufficient wake-up call. Instead, we limp along focusing all of our functional resources towards our dysfunction, almost like the most proficient addict who finds new and inventive ways to fight sobriety. It is truly a sight to behold.
Many cells have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contractile_vacuole
It's an organelle that periodically contracts to expel water from inside the cell, out. This prevents the cell from absorbing too much water through osmosis and rupturing.
Even the individual cells are bailing water, as if from a sinking life raft. Always have been. Life itself is a process of dysfunctional function. Actively resisting death. It makes sense that we see this reflected at all scales. It is not a disorder, it is the natural state of living in a universe with entropy.
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Does it work that way? Is a curse actually cast if it is a machine reading its text rather than a human?
Can machines curse?
This is a question addressed in https://unsongbook.com/
How would we know that the AI didn't hallucinate when it translated a tablet? In other words, how could one trust the translation? A human translator can still provide some justification for their interpretation.
Also, "acquired" could simply mean that the museum paid money to a third party to, well, acquire the piece(s) in question while not inquiring too deeply into how said third party came into possession of the objects that they sold.
I remember a time team episode where they found some Ogham script on a stone in an early Christian church now on a fairway on the isle of Mann.
They got photos to the leading professor in Ogham who translated it for them.
I happened to mention this on HN a few months ago in relation to something or other, and a commenter replied to me to explain that that translation was no longer sound, and the current understanding was that the tablet said something completely different instead!
(Found the link they gave! https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2008/05/throng-of-fifty-wa...)
If it wasn't an LLM that found the professor's mistake then the point I think you're trying to make is, well, missing the point: a human made a mistake, and humans found out and corrected it. The question is what happens when LLMs make mistakes. Will people still be careful enough to catch and correct them, as often as we find and correct the mistakes we make ourselves? Or will our ability to do so be overwhelmed by the extreme rate at which LLMs can generate text?
My point was more meta - the experts don’t have a fixed opinion on the translations of rare ancient texts in the first place, ergo there is nothing to train the llma on.
At the very least one could see from the AI if the tablet is interesting or not. That could triage tablets for human translation.
This is the same thing as trusting its translation though. Or worse, since there's more "interpretation" happening (as it's basically a summary rather than a whole text, and you can't trust either of those steps).
It's like using a classifier to sort biopsies from most-likely to least-likely to be Really Bad News. A human will get to them all eventually, but you can at least fast-track the ones that are almost certainly Really Bad News.
(I think I just said "triage" in a lot more words, to be honest).
Sure, as long as one has some means of predicting the probability of false positives as well as false negatives. Until then, colour me unconvinced of the (f)utility of this approach :)
LLMs do a pretty darn good job of translating other languages, even preserving inflection and tone and rhyme in some cases. Same when translating programming languages. If the training pool is large enough, they should be quite good at it.
No problem marking them as machine translated and keeping track of which have been spot-checked by experts either.
I think "if the training pool is large enough" is a real issue here. We're not talking about living languages with large, properly attested and annotated corpuses.
Indeed, one of the thing you'd probably like the translators to do is identify rare or unique words that can be added to our existing knowledge of these languages.
> I think "if the training pool is large enough" is a real issue here.
It would be really neat to set up something like a wiki populated with the existing translations and machine translations done via LLM, and to periodically re-train the LLM on all the newly manually verified translations and automatically re-run the machine translations after. The whole thing could move incrementally toward high quality output.
> Is "acquired" a euphemism for stolen here?
Given what and where they were from it almost certainly means donated or sold to the museum by the archeologists who excavated them in the first place.
It sounds like they were excavated in 1881-1882 (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sippar#Archaeology) by Hormuzd Rassam ("widely believed to be the first-known Middle Eastern and Assyrian archaeologist from the Ottoman empire."; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormuzd_Rassam) working in conjunction with the British Museum.
"From 1877 to 1882, while undertaking four expeditions on behalf of the British Museum, Rassam made some important discoveries. Numerous finds of significance were transported to the museum, thanks to an agreement made with the Ottoman Sultan by Rassam's old colleague Austen Henry Layard, now Ambassador at Constantinople, allowing Rassam to return and continue their earlier excavations and to 'pack and dispatch to England any antiquities [he] found ... provided, however, there were no duplicates.' A representative of the Sultan was instructed to be present at the dig to examine the objects as they were uncovered."
So, not a euphemism for "stolen".
Yes but can everyone involved - both the original archeologists who excavated them and the people who bought them - claim ancestry from whatever ancient society made them, or at least the oldest traceable group to have resided on that land? AIUI that is how "stolen" tends to be construed for archaeological things these days.
That idea makes sense in an American context where there is a clear divide between indigenous and more recent groups. The same is true of some other places like Australia.
In Eurasia and Africa this does not work. "The oldest traceable group" may be many invasions, conquests and mass migrations after the things were made. The current residents or earliest traceable group may well have enslaved, oppressed, or killed the group who made the things. In many, many cases they would have erased the culture that made them.
In the case of these tablets there is no one who can meaningfully claim to be an Akkadian.
> Also, are there online scans of the tablets? Maybe the problem is not the scarcity of scholars, but gatekeeping?
With a few minutes of searching the internet, you would not have written that inappropriate question.
Tablets are 3D objects which are most often eroded and broken. A plain photography, like one would make for a sheet of paper, is useless in the general case. To bring out the cuneiform characters, the light must be raking the surface. And don't forget that that surface can be concave, and text can go over the sides. Most tablets need many photos with different lights. It's a long and hard work that is not automated.
Guess what, Scholars have heard about AI. If AI could help them publish astonishing papers and push forward their career, do you really think they wouldn't rush to it?
See aicuneiform.com
Have you ever read translations of such ancient texts? Why are you so certain there are enough reliable translations to do the model training?
Look at https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.3.1.2... , for example. To me it doesn't come across as something I would expect an LLM to be able to produce. They are basically decent at translating between certain languages, and only documents that are very formal. As soon as metaphor, idioms and so on come up in source texts they suck.
There's more translated sumerian you can read here: https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/edition2/etcslbycat.php
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> “The eclipse of one of the great celestial lights—the sun or the moon—meant that on Earth a great figure would be eclipsed,” says George. “That is, a king would die.”
> the king would go into hiding and a temporary substitute would be placed on the throne. Once the threat was deemed to have passed, the king would reassume his position. To dispose of any lingering evil, his stand-in would then be executed.
I love how people can believe in an all seeing, all knowing, and all powerful god and yet also believe that deity can be tricked with such an obvious ruse.
I don’t know if that’s arrogance, stupidity or desperation. Perhaps a combination of all three.
But the Babylonians didn't believe in an all seeing, all knowing, all powerful god. They weren't even monotheistic.
Still, you'd agree any God that can control the heavens and the fate of the earth, if you thought about it for 2 seconds would be quite unlikely to be fooled by that ruse, even if they are 'only' a lesser God..., right?
They probably did the ruse, and it worked. The king lived. From that point on, it was a tried and tested solution.
It wasn't the god they tricking, it was the populace (and the next in line to the throne).
Remember Prometheus? He stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to the humans.
In a different legend the gods held counsel to decide what parts of a ritual sacrifice would go to them, and what part to the humans. Prometheus gathered up the sacrificed animal's bones, polished them with its fat, wrapped them up in its hide and presented them to Zeus who was delighted at the artful arrangement, apparently, and accepted them in place of the bloody and dodgy looking meat and guts of the animal. So the humans kept the meat and guts, the gods got the bones.
No wonder Zeus punished Prometheus cruelly, for a thousand years until Hercules saved him. You probably know the story - rock, chains, eagle, liver, etc.
In yet other legends the gods fought the Titans (Prometheus was a Titan), and the Giants. The war with the Giants being especially bloody to the point that one Giant caught Zeus and cut the nerves from his arms and legs and left him paralysed, until Hermes stole the nerves and took them back to Zeus. The legend is a bit poor on details regarding how exactly he achieved this, but hey, gods.
All this is to say- yeah, the Gods were more powerful than humans. They commanded the weather, the sea, the earth and the sun; but they weren't omnipotent beings and they weren't even the creators of the world. Chaos was the creator of the world. Or possibly Chaos and Nyx together with Eros. From Chaos sprang Ouranos the sky, Gaia, the earth, and everything else in between and above. The Olympians came much later. In a sense they were the young upstarts. Zeus ... well, maimed his own father, Kronus (time?). Who had been eating all his children. So that's how Zeus became king of the gods: he usurped his Dad and fought two big wars against other pretenders to the throne. Hardly omnipotent. But very powerful nonetheless.
The Moirai -the Fates- were more powerful than Zeus, and all the other Gods combined: whatever the Fates decided, happened. When the Fates decided Hercules, the son of Zeus, would die, nothing Zeus could say or do would change their mind. Hercules died, and in a horrible, gruesome manner.
The gods were not omnipotent. Not the Olympians. Not, apparently, those of the Babylonians also. But their stories I don't know (I grew up in Athens, not Babylon).
That’s an excellent counterpoint. I guess when viewed from that perspective then it’s a little less surprising that kings felt they could trick their gods.
Thanks for sharing :)
:)
That's brutal they'd execute the stand-in after the celestial omen was deemed to have passed. I wonder if the person standing in knew it was coming? Was it a great honour to take the king's place during a crisis, or was the person put there in a more deceptive way?
Sounds like the premise for a Babylonian fish-out-of-water comedy. “It’s like Trading Places meets Gilgamesh!”
With lots of Assyrian butt jokes.
Kra-merggu slides into Jer-ishtal's apartment and exclaims "I can't see a thing."
Jer-ishtal looks on bemused, and says "open that one."
laugh track ensues
[cut to commercial for Crazy Ea-Nasir's Copper Emporium]
You can look up Ellen Pao and her time as interim CEO of Reddit for recent example.
In pre-scientific societies, "let's just murder a bunch of people and see if it helps" seems to be a surprisingly common way of handling all kinds of things. Google "Children of Llullaillaco" for an absolutely heartbreaking example of this.
There is a non-zero chance I will be part of the stand-in pool for the USA in the next 4 years :) It's not gonna help anything, but you know
They didn't even have a control group?!?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-deciphered-4...
> “This eclipse is … set aside for testing,” the newly translated cuneiform reads at one point, indicating the need for another round of rigorous omen-checking before the future could be foretold.
I wonder how would they know if an omen test "passes".
What if these are not omens, but something else? Maybe it was a school lesson, and the "set aside for testing" is some teacher note. This would not be unusual, as we already know sumerians used tablets as school notebooks.
I don't know which parts of these media articles talk about the content of the tablet or the interpretation of the scholars. Is the thing about entrails on the newly translated tablet itself, or is that from another place and the scholars made an association?
Again, I would love to be able to read the tablet (digital transliteration + translation).
There is a really excellent podcast on the history of astronomy called The Song of Urania[0] that goes into a ton of depth about eclipses and how different cultures viewed and recorded the events of the sky. [0]https://songofurania.com/
how do we feel about messing with history trying to repair broken statues? https://imgur.com/a/sAeWnCp