Dead languages are famously hard to decipher. It took 23 years to crack the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone. It took nearly two centuries to understand Mayan glyphs. And it took over 3,000 years to reveal Linear B, the earliest form of Greek. When techno-optimists talk about the game-changing potential of A.I., they cite difficult problems like this, and even for languages that have already been translated, challenges remain. Consider Akkadian cuneiform, one of the world’s oldest written languages. There are so few people who can read the extinct language that nearly a million Akkadian texts still haven't been translated to date—but now an A.I. tool can decode them within seconds.
An interdisciplinary group of computer science and history researchers published a journal article in May describing how they had created an A.I. model to instantly translate the ancient glyphs. The team, led by a Google software engineer and an Assyriologist from Ariel University, trained the model on existing cuneiform translations using the same technology that powers Google Translate.
