Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

This whole thing reminds me of Snow Crash. Its like Hiro talking with the librarian ai that comes with the infocalypse stack from Lagos. Too bad I don’t have any problems that interesting to solve!

Be careful not to ask it to write the Funniest Joke in the World [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World

Actually-- though I love the attempt to use AI on this problem-- you could probably get an answer in a fairly straightforward manner by contacting the museum.

Curators (and knowledge organizers & cataloguers of all sorts like professional librarians) tend to very much enjoy the curiosity of the public into obscure niches. It might take time in terms of foot-speed, but the current staff could likely track down the records of all displays from that time period and thereby narrow down the field significantly.

When I was at University the reference librarians were always extremely enthusiastic to help with any request, especially those that went beyond something like "could you point me towards material about the foundations of modern psychology?" or some other straightforward request.

As a side-anecdote to this, I once requested of a reference librarian where I might find a copy of a (US) state's budget appropriations. They stayed with me for more than an hour as we explored various documents in more granular detail & historical trends, ending only when my own endurance gave out.

Oh yes, that was a creepy & horrifyingly hilariously (if accurately conveyed) output [1]. My non-anthropomorphized consolation there is that it was only mimicking the probable utterances of countless prior humans, as if they were forced to 1) stick to what it thinks is factual and 2) forces to be unflinchingly and saccharine-sweet polite in the process.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/

It is. Here's a professional translation for this [0]:

    ...they made bricks. I razed that small palace in its entirety, took a large area from the fields for an addition, and added (it) to it (the palace). I laid its foundations with limestone, strong stone from the mountains, and raised the terrace.

    I summoned the kings of Ḫatti and Across the River (Syria-Palestine) Baʾalu, king of Tyre, Manasseh, king of Judah, Qaʾuš-gabri, king of Edom, Muṣurī, king of Moab, Ṣil-Bēl, king of Gaza, Mitinti, king of Ashkelon, ...

Even if the translation wasn't very wrong, I'd be incredibly skeptical of this because Akkadian and Sumerian share a lot of words that are written the same way, but have very different meanings (which can even be mixed within a document!). They're usually documented separately in dictionaries and most translations will have a convention to denote each usage. [1] has a good example of how dense these sorts of notational conventions can get.

[0] http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/Q003230

[1] https://brill.com/display/book/9789004417564/front-10.xml