As others have noticed, the translation is hilariously wrong. Even if your only method for gauging the correctness of the so-called "translation" were googling, you will easily find Leichty's [0] or Borger's [1] editions with translations.
So to be very clear, saying "a translation is lacking" is thoroughly incorrect. It betrays a lack of familiarity with the subject and its reference works.
Moving back to when I first saw this post, I immediately gravitated towards checking the "translation" and so neglected to read anything else written. Now that I've lovingly wasted my time transcribing and translating from the supplied transliteration before checking Leichty [0], I can move on to wasting my time with the other issues.
The initial complaint about a "Karen" is obnoxious and unhelpful. You can always _write down_ the id number or title of an object in a museum if you have a specific interest. If the tablet one is interested in is Biblically relevant, then it is almost certainly referenced in literature (which you can take a shortcut to find said literature if you have that number you wrote down). All you have to do is some reading and/or contacting of relevant scholars. Tablets with references to Biblical events and persons are often exceptionally well documented due to Biblical scholarship's smothering embrace of Assyriology. If you think there might be multiple copies of this tablet, then you could ask Hobby Lobby's if they have a copy in their collection they obtained by funding ISIS. I'm sure they would love to talk about it.
Moving away from museum etiquette, there are some other issues.
Searching through the CDLI requires some effort. It is a tool, not a search engine with results ranked for relevance and ad revenue. Knowing the language and the processes of transliteration, transcription, and translation will help. Spellings can vary within dialects and search will not conjugate or magically find alternative cases for you. The transliterations on the CDLI are less than perfect so don't think you can just train some LLM to do this for you (There is a lot of bad data. Feel free to make some more bad data by doing some transliterating yourself with the provided low dpi images. Transliterating without both the tablet and a movable light source in front of you can border on impossible. You might make a transliteration, but it will be bad if you lack the will spend weeks staring at a photograph.). I found at least 25 texts with decent mentions of some Manassehs on the CDLI. Keep searching and remember that ChatGPT doesn't really understand cases and conjugations in the Akkadian dialects :) (especially for loan words lol).
Oh and "Lugal" is Sumerian. Saying "the Akkadian word Lugal" is simply wrong. This is basic stuff.
In Neo-Assyrian cuneiform (I hesitate to say all cuneiform writing systems but it probably is all (that includes non semitic languages)), LUGAL is a logogram for the "king". In this text, since it is written in the Neo-Assryian dialect of Akkadian, that would be šarru in whatever case (nominative, genitive, accusative) is appropriate.
Oh and finally, it is very clear that it is a King Manasseh _of Judah_. Not Assur. Manasseh is not an Assyrian name. If you actually look at the text and just read the goddamn Akkadian, this will be obvious. It clearly says "m^me-na-si-i LUGAL URU.ia-ú-di" not "m^me-na-si-i LUGAL aš-šur^ki". It's not hard to see how wrong the translation is if you just, you know, actually translate the Akkadian. Looking more closely, ChatGPT seems to be unable to associate the given names of kings with place names. Can it not apply its "understanding" of the genitive? Is it just stupid? In fact, many of the place names in the ChatGPT translation are not mentioned anywhere in the column, let alone in this specific section.
From these initial observations, GPT4/ChatGPT seems incapable of understanding rote definitions of Akkadian vocabulary, Akkadian grammatical constructs, determinatives, logograms, et al. The reading of col. V line 55 is incredibly simple. If the now GPT4 powered ChatGPT cannot translate _that_, I suspect it will be a long while before LLMs can even begin producing marginally correct translations of texts written in cuneiform. I think that doing this correctly will require an absolutely massive, tailor-made model. Since the age of giant models is now over [2] (lol) the funding just probably won't be there.
From fighting with this now essay length comment, it is my newly formed opinion that proofreading hallucinated translations is more difficult that just doing the translation yourself. Any work with untranslated cuneiform requires accuracy and a thorough comprehension of the text itself. Errors, even if small can completely ruin whatever point/thesis you were trying to make.
You have to remember that when dealing with cuneiform texts you aren't dealing with one language. You are dealing with whatever the cuneiform was written in, probably some sumerian phrases, maybe the language of the scribe, the languages of your reference works and dictionaries (English, French, German, etc), the idiosyncrasies of the scribe from 4000++ years ago, the idiosyncrasies of the transliterator, missing chunks of tablet, and a writing system that has no modern equivalent. And even just knowing all those things isn't enough, you personally have to be able to fill in all the gaps left by the human actions along the chain of translation. LLMs seem to struggle with the unsaid, barely hinted human influence that is a core part of translating texts written in cuneiform. Will an LLM ever be able to imagine itself as a scribe 3000 years ago, pushing a reed stylus into damp clay to make the signs of an already dead language? Will it understand why that is necessary for translation? Can it comprehend the nuance stacked on nuance that lead to it ingesting whatever text it is going to fail to translate? If it does not, then it is a poor translator. And when working with languages written in cuneiform, a poor translation is worse than useless.
Ah, I didn't catch that.
Perhaps that's why the quality was just so poor. I did look at the attempted GPT4 "translations" elsewhere in the thread [0]; my views have not changed.
Their apparent superficial improvement may make for an even worse "translation". Instead of being obviously incorrect, they might beget some misplaced trust. With the GPT3 version, at least the single slice of hallucination was obviously useless. With the GPT4 result, some parts seem to be more correct. Mainly, it's not hallucinating locations and seems to actually have _some_ proficiency with the genitive case. Though I would say the GPT4 translation is an improvement over the one from GPT3, it has improved from something with no basis in reality to one that is more wrong than right.
From col. V line 55 and later, GPT4 gets the bottom of the barrel usage of the genitive mostly correct. Before that, it can't grasp the concept of an adjective. So I guess that's an improvement from "lacking a basis in reality" to "still completely wrong but inspiring confidence in the untrained eye".
Not great.
Although it attempts to transcribe some of the place names, meaning it is no longer hallucinating them, there seems to have been no effort made at translation.
This is again (and again and again it seems) something that is both extremely basic and essential; (known) place names are not hard.
On the topic of transcriptions, the names of kings are poorly transcribed. It clearly doesn't know what to do with alephs in both place and personal names.
Another less than stellar effort.
Everything before line 54 in the GPT4 "translation" is a blood bath. Picking it apart is sisyphean.
Taking a look at a different attempted GPT4 "translation" [1], this time of col. I, I don't have anything to add that I haven't already said.
It is useless incoherent garbage that the popular imagination might mistake for a real translation. The best way to correct the result would be to re-translate it yourself. It smashes a bunch of words together to form an output that so thoroughly differs in meaning from the original that it has graduated from "wrong" to "fiction a layperson might believe".
The Claude attempt [2] is more of the same. An awful "translation". Incorrect information. General incoherency on the ancient near east.
Extra points off for using unicode cuneiform rather just transliteration. Asking about something in "Babylonian cuneiform" is a meaningless way to start; what time period are we talking about here? They can be pretty different... The compliance and lack of clarification from the LLM is pathetic. And the topic at hand is NA cuneiform, not OB, MB, or NB (or LB). When you program in C#, do you say you're a C programmer?
Esarhaddon's prisms are not crazy exotic, grammatically complex, unknown, and/or untranslated texts.
They are the assyriological equivalent of an uncrustable. The grammar is simple and the writing system (NA cuneiform) is refined.
There nothing difficult here.
The incompetency and general idiocy displayed by the now three different (though perhaps incestuously related) LLMs in this thread is shocking.
Who has the time and will to stem this indomitable wall faeces being spewed towards the ancient near east by these chatbots? Going through each response, line by line to demonstrate that yes, this translation is indeed wrong, is taxing. There is no joy here.
And that's just the translations. I don't know where Claude [2] got its ideas about ancient near eastern writing/phonology/grammar/culture. Maybe it makes sense if you glaze over while skimming through a poorly written wikipedia article (which encompasses most on the ANE). Nearly every single line of response has something that ranges from subtly to flagrantly wrong. Claude (and GPT friends) are making bricks for your foundational understanding of the ANE. It just so happens that those "bricks" are frozen blocks of ground beef and you're building a foundation at Nineveh. The bricks will rot and fester in the pitiless sun; as they melt the surrounding baked clay, maggots will weave through your walls and your house will become an abomination left better un-built.
These LLMs have no place in Assyriology or for those working with aspects of the ANE. In academia, there is no room for "improved" "translations" that are the product of merged queries "strengthened" by the reprocessing of garbage [1]. An incorrect translation is still incorrect, no matter how much its readability has been improved through the chewing of regurgitated cud. "Partially correct" or "mostly correct" translations are worse than irrelevant, they waste the time and expertise of all they touch.
Many of the academically relevant translations done today are not of simple, easily read, and well preserved texts like Esarhaddon's prism seen in this thread. Simple texts with available transliterations/transcriptions that also somehow lack translations can be trivially read and translated on the fly off the page with experience, no LLM needed.
With complicated translations, there is really no room for error. An LLM translated passage that differs in meaning from the original text due to the LLM's fundamental inability to comprehend basic grammar is not something to celebrate. The correct interpretation of the text is the point. Until LLMs find/are given a non-hallucinated "understanding" of the cultures and writing systems in the ANE, any produced translation will be dangerous to the amateur and worthless to the academic.
If you fall into the category of amateur, rather than running the CDLI's transliterations through a chatbot, just find a real translation of the text from an academic source. Doing this will expose you to relevant context in the form of commentary, texts, and citations. References to literature that exists in our shared reality rather than those generated by the throes of a hallucinating LLM can be helpful for research.
The GPT3 translations of NA are a joke. Those done by GPT4 are similarly worthless while containing fragments of connection to the text. Although I would consider the GPT4 "translations" to be "better", I would also think them to be more dangerous to the reader than GPT3's due to their thin gilding of competence. Anthropic/Claude have a long way to go. I suggest its makers start by wiping all training data pertaining to the ANE and begin training again with fresh with data from competent authors.
Moving back to when I first saw this post, I immediately gravitated towards checking the "translation" and so neglected to read anything else written. Now that I've lovingly wasted my time transcribing and translating from the supplied transliteration before checking Leichty [0], I can move on to wasting my time with the other issues.
The initial complaint about a "Karen" is obnoxious and unhelpful. You can always _write down_ the id number or title of an object in a museum if you have a specific interest. If the tablet one is interested in is Biblically relevant, then it is almost certainly referenced in literature (which you can take a shortcut to find said literature if you have that number you wrote down). All you have to do is some reading and/or contacting of relevant scholars. Tablets with references to Biblical events and persons are often exceptionally well documented due to Biblical scholarship's smothering embrace of Assyriology. If you think there might be multiple copies of this tablet, then you could ask Hobby Lobby's if they have a copy in their collection they obtained by funding ISIS. I'm sure they would love to talk about it.
Moving away from museum etiquette, there are some other issues. Searching through the CDLI requires some effort. It is a tool, not a search engine with results ranked for relevance and ad revenue. Knowing the language and the processes of transliteration, transcription, and translation will help. Spellings can vary within dialects and search will not conjugate or magically find alternative cases for you. The transliterations on the CDLI are less than perfect so don't think you can just train some LLM to do this for you (There is a lot of bad data. Feel free to make some more bad data by doing some transliterating yourself with the provided low dpi images. Transliterating without both the tablet and a movable light source in front of you can border on impossible. You might make a transliteration, but it will be bad if you lack the will spend weeks staring at a photograph.). I found at least 25 texts with decent mentions of some Manassehs on the CDLI. Keep searching and remember that ChatGPT doesn't really understand cases and conjugations in the Akkadian dialects :) (especially for loan words lol).
Oh and "Lugal" is Sumerian. Saying "the Akkadian word Lugal" is simply wrong. This is basic stuff. In Neo-Assyrian cuneiform (I hesitate to say all cuneiform writing systems but it probably is all (that includes non semitic languages)), LUGAL is a logogram for the "king". In this text, since it is written in the Neo-Assryian dialect of Akkadian, that would be šarru in whatever case (nominative, genitive, accusative) is appropriate.
Oh and finally, it is very clear that it is a King Manasseh _of Judah_. Not Assur. Manasseh is not an Assyrian name. If you actually look at the text and just read the goddamn Akkadian, this will be obvious. It clearly says "m^me-na-si-i LUGAL URU.ia-ú-di" not "m^me-na-si-i LUGAL aš-šur^ki". It's not hard to see how wrong the translation is if you just, you know, actually translate the Akkadian. Looking more closely, ChatGPT seems to be unable to associate the given names of kings with place names. Can it not apply its "understanding" of the genitive? Is it just stupid? In fact, many of the place names in the ChatGPT translation are not mentioned anywhere in the column, let alone in this specific section.
From these initial observations, GPT4/ChatGPT seems incapable of understanding rote definitions of Akkadian vocabulary, Akkadian grammatical constructs, determinatives, logograms, et al. The reading of col. V line 55 is incredibly simple. If the now GPT4 powered ChatGPT cannot translate _that_, I suspect it will be a long while before LLMs can even begin producing marginally correct translations of texts written in cuneiform. I think that doing this correctly will require an absolutely massive, tailor-made model. Since the age of giant models is now over [2] (lol) the funding just probably won't be there.
From fighting with this now essay length comment, it is my newly formed opinion that proofreading hallucinated translations is more difficult that just doing the translation yourself. Any work with untranslated cuneiform requires accuracy and a thorough comprehension of the text itself. Errors, even if small can completely ruin whatever point/thesis you were trying to make.
You have to remember that when dealing with cuneiform texts you aren't dealing with one language. You are dealing with whatever the cuneiform was written in, probably some sumerian phrases, maybe the language of the scribe, the languages of your reference works and dictionaries (English, French, German, etc), the idiosyncrasies of the scribe from 4000++ years ago, the idiosyncrasies of the transliterator, missing chunks of tablet, and a writing system that has no modern equivalent. And even just knowing all those things isn't enough, you personally have to be able to fill in all the gaps left by the human actions along the chain of translation. LLMs seem to struggle with the unsaid, barely hinted human influence that is a core part of translating texts written in cuneiform. Will an LLM ever be able to imagine itself as a scribe 3000 years ago, pushing a reed stylus into damp clay to make the signs of an already dead language? Will it understand why that is necessary for translation? Can it comprehend the nuance stacked on nuance that lead to it ingesting whatever text it is going to fail to translate? If it does not, then it is a poor translator. And when working with languages written in cuneiform, a poor translation is worse than useless.
[0] https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/978-1-57506-209-9.h... [1] AfO Bh. 9 [2] https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of...