> 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.
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).
Thanks for sharing :)
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?
Which is great until it blithely translates an ancient curse and initiates the apocalypse.
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.
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.
Can machines curse?
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.
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...)
So the done thing in translation is to choose some existing translation as a "gold standard" and use that one, without any assumptions of how good or bad it is. Sometimes there's an attempt to rate translations by polling humans but that can not be easily done at scale and certainly not at web-scale, as in LLMs (the modern de facto standard for automatic translation as far as I can tell; I haven't been watching the field closely lately).
The same logic is applied to metrics like BLEU and ROUGE scores, used to measure the goodness of a translation. The general idea is that you choose a translation to be the "gold standard" and then compare the n-grams in the gold standard, and the automatic translation, for overlap.
It's a very crude and imperfect measure and it's one reason why, in practice, we have no idea how good automatic translations are especially now that automatic translation systems are deployed and working every day with millions of input and output texts that nobody can reasonably be expected to evaluate.
In any case just because there's no fixed opinion on what is a good translation, doesn't mean an LLM can't be used to produce one. It probably will. Assuming I understand your point better now, I agree that this is going to cause trouble down the line.
(I think I just said "triage" in a lot more words, to be honest).
No problem marking them as machine translated and keeping track of which have been spot-checked by experts either.
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.
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.
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.
"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".
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.
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
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?
> “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).