Digital Assyriology Using artificial intelligence to unlock an ancient lingua franca

istory and archaeology are often perceived to be non-quantitative fields, the purview of bespectacled technophobes languishing among the dusty tomes of dark library aisles or covered in sand, trowel in hand. This could not be further from the truth for many modern-day practitioners. Recent years have seen the application of cuttingedge techniques to various fields in the humanities, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. One such field is Assyriology, the study of texts discovered in the ancient Near East and written in the cuneiform script on clay tablets.