Scientists are using machine learning to unlock the mysteries of long-dead languages

Although cuneiform passed to other Mesopotamian cultures, which refined and altered it to suit their own languages and dialects, knowledge of how to read and write the various cuneiform scripts was gradually lost to time. In the 19th century, translators managed to decipher the writing system; and in 1872 the Assyriologist George Smith translated the most famous example of cuneiform, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a 4000-year-old poem widely believed to be the earliest surviving great work of literature. Unfortunately, translation of cuneiform tablets is still a time-consuming process and there are very few modern scholars who are able to decipher them. Sumerian is what is known as a "language isolate", one that has no genealogical relationship to any other language spoken today. But modern technology has given researchers new hope of unravelling the script imprinted on the roughly 300,000 cuneiform tablets discovered to date, of which only around 10% have been translated so far.