Babylonian text missing for 1,000 years deciphered with AI

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A team of ancient literature experts have deciphered a Mesopotamain text that was missing for over 1,000 years. Etched on clay tablets, the Hymn to Babylon describes the ancient megacity in “all of its majesty,” and gives new insights into the everyday lives of those who resided there. The text is detailed in a study published in the journal Iraq.

a cuniform tablet — The cuneiform tablet with the newly discovered hymn. CREDIT: LMU/Anmar A. Fadhil, Department of Archaeology, University of Baghdad, with the permission of the Iraqi Museum and the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

An ancient cultural hub

Founded in Mesopotamia around 2,000 BCE, Babylon was once the largest city in the world. Babylon’s ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 52 miles outside of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. At its height, the city was a cultural hub that inspired written works that still form part of our global heritage today. A religious text called the Enuma elish or Babylonian Epic of Creation details the creation of the universe and the rise of Marduk, the city’s chief god. The Code of Hammurabi is one of the oldest surviving legal frameworks, and includes the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.”.

Babylonian texts were primarily composed of an ancient writing system called cuniform on clay tablets. Most of these tablets have only survived in tiny fragments. One of the goals of a team from the University of Baghdad in Iraq and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany has been to decipher and preserve hundreds of cuneiform tablets included in the Sippar Library. This collection of texts was uncovered in the Temple of Shamash in the ancient city of Sippar, Iraq. Legends also say that Old Testament hero Noah hid tablets in Sippar before boarding his ark when the floodwaters came.

[ Related: 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian artifacts linked to the dawn of writing. ]

‘Written by a Babylonian who wanted to praise his city’

In the Electronic Babylonian Library Platform, study co-author and Assyriologist Enrique Jiménez is digitizing all of the cuneiform text fragments that have been discovered around the world. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), he is piecing together fragments that belong together.

“Using our AI-supported platform, we managed to identify 30 other manuscripts that belong to the rediscovered hymn – a process that would formerly have taken decades,” Jiménez said in a statement.

With these additional texts, the team was able to completely decipher this ancient hymn of praise. In it, they found some new insights into Babylonian urban society and believe that the Hymn to Babylon was very widespread.

“The hymn was copied by children at school. It’s unusual that such a popular text in its day was unknown to us before now,” Jiménez said. The song of triumph–or paean–likely dates back to the start of the first millennium before Christ and is made up of 250 lines.

“It was written by a Babylonian who wanted to praise his city,” said Jiménez. “The author describes the buildings in the city, but also how the waters of the Euphrates bring the spring and green the fields. This is all the more spectacular as surviving Mesopotamian literature is sparing in its descriptions of natural phenomena.”

One of the exciting new discoveries includes new information regarding Babylonian women–many were priestesses. The hymns also describe the inhabitants as being respectful to foreigners.