The Oxford report said that the problem in translating these ancient texts is finding a complete tablet, saying that clay tablets are rarely preserved in their entirety, and as a result, neural machine translation, as well as human translation, are affected by a lack of context. "The easiest way to understand hieroglyphs is to imagine that they are the ancient Egyptian equivalent of emojis," Fabricius said. Fabricius lets users decode ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs into English using online tools developed by the tech giant. Earlier this month, researchers used AI to discover Nasca geoglyphs, etchings of humans and animals, in Peru.Īnother project looking to help modern researchers understand ancient languages and text is Google Fabricius. In May, an Italian research team published a paper detailing how AI can be used to detect ancient sites for archaeological discovery in the Mesopotamian floodplains.
The oldest surviving literary work, the Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in 1853, was written over 4,000 years ago in the Akkadian language using cuneiform script.
It was used as English is today."Ĭuneiform, meanwhile, originated around 3400 BCE and is one of the earliest writing systems used to document several ancient dialects, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Aramaic, and Old Persian. "People in Mesopotamia spoke different languages and used Akkadian to communicate. It was the common language in the old Middle East and Mesopotamia," Gutherz said.
#Ai develops language transcript software#
Gutherz, a software engineer at Google, said that while translating Akkadian proved more challenging than Spanish, there was a large amount of data to pull from because it was a widely spoken and written language in its time. "There is only a small amount of data you could use to train the models we managed to get to tens of thousandss examples." "The main challenge for us is the lack of a large amount of data," Gai Gutherz, who co-authored the report, told Decrypt in an interview. "Yet, most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their sheer number and limited quantity of experts able to read them."īut using AI to read ancient text is not as simple as running a picture through a ChatGPT plugin. "Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script document the political, social, economic, and scientific history of ancient Mesopotamia," the report said.
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