Fig 1.
Example of cuneiform writing from a gold tablet of Ashurnaṣirpal II.
This is a foundation inscription buried under the palace of Ashurnaṣirpal in the city Apqu (modern Tell Abu Marya, see link [3]), where it was found millennia later by archaeologists. After giving the titles of the king, the text introduces itself as a foundation inscription, written on gold and silver (the silver parallel of this copy was found alongside the gold). This is an anomaly for cuneiform texts, which were usually written on clay. Therefore, these inscriptions are a symbol of great wealth and extravagance. It ends with curse formulae for later princes who may dare to erase Ashurnaṣirpal’s name from his inscriptions. It is currently in the Yale Babylonian collection (YBC 2398; YPM BC 16991), republished from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History under a CC BY license, with permission from Klaus Wagensonner, original copyright 2020.
Table 1.
Breakdown of RINAP corpora.
Fig 2.
On the left are the original cuneiform characters written on the obverse of the gold tablet introduced in Fig 1. On the right is the Unicode version which was generated from the transliteration of this inscription.
Fig 3.
An illustration of the bidirectional LSTM.
Table 2.
Test accuracy for all models.
Fig 4.
These are lines 31-34 of the second column of Sennacherib’s clay prism, probably from Nineveh, now in the Israel Museum (IMJ 71.072.0249). The text records eight campaigns of the Assyrian King, including the siege of Jerusalem which is well known from the Book of Kings. The line reads: ‘On my return march, I received a heavy tribute from the distant Medes, of whose land none of the kings, my ancestors, had heard mention.’ (translation adapted from A.K. Grayson and J. Novotny’s edition available on ORACC, Q003497).
Table 3.
Accuracy on case-studies.