Many Babylonian clay tablets are partly illegible, but Israeli historians and archaeologists have managed to find the meaning of this cuneiform writing thanks to artificial intelligence. Hard task: “Each sign is either a symbol summarizing an entire word, or a syllable or a determinant, explains Shai Gordin of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences in Ariel (West Bank). Not to mention that many signs can be read as one of the three options. And then, the writing has 3000 years of history and the signs have changed form from one region and one culture to another in Mesopotamia! ” From several tens of thousands of digitized cuneiform lines, the algorithm proceeded in three stages: it examined the context close to each word; then studied the context more broadly, and finally read the entire text back and forth. He thus managed to read royal texts that were previously unreadable, and to decipher their meaning up to 97% by guessing the missing words.
