AI translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablets into English.

Cuneiform is one of the earliest writing systems in human history. Archaeologists have traced its beginnings to around 3400–3300 BC, more than 5,000 years ago. It also lasted for a remarkably long time: the last securely dated cuneiform text comes from 75 AD.

Researchers have found hundreds of thousands of texts written in cuneiform, many of them in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. Now, they’ve also trained a neural network that can translate digitized Akkadian cuneiform into English.

An old, mysterious language

The Akkadian language is one of the earliest known Semitic languages, a family that includes modern languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. It was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, primarily in the Akkadian Empire that was situated in the region that is today parts of Iraq and northeastern Syria. Akkadian is named after the ancient city of Akkad, one of the major centers of the Akkadian civilization.

Akkadian was used for a wide range of purposes, from administrative and legal documents to literature and science texts. It was written using cuneiform script on clay tablets, and its decipherment in the 19th century opened up a new window into the ancient world, providing scholars with valuable insights into the history, culture, and scientific achievements of the time.

Meanwhile, Sumerian is one of the world’s oldest known languages, and it has the distinction of being a language isolate, meaning it has no known relatives. It was spoken in ancient Sumer, a region located in the southern part of what is now modern-day Iraq. The Sumerians are credited with establishing one of the world’s earliest civilizations around 4500 BCE, and their society flourished until about 2000 BCE.

Both languages used the cuneiform writing system, as did several other languages. Cuneiform is therefore a script rather than a language in itself (it’s not exactly an alphabet, either). It was adapted to write at least 15 languages, including Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite and Elamite.

Cuneiform, meet AI

In recent years, language translations have come a long way — and AI is greatly accelerating these trends in automation. AI translations are nearing a watershed moment, with some pretty striking achievements. In the new study, Shai Gordin and colleagues from Ariel University described an AI model that can automatically translate Akkadian text written in cuneiform into English. For now, this is only available for this particular language (not all languages that use the cuneiform script work at the moment), but it’s still remarkable.