[HN Gopher] Bad Moon Rising
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Bad Moon Rising
Author : samclemens
Score : 37 points
Date : 2025-01-08 17:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (archaeology.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archaeology.org)
| LeonenTheDK wrote:
| That's brutal they'd execute the stand-in after the celestial
| omen was deemed to have passed. I wonder if the person standing
| in knew it was coming? Was it a great honour to take the king's
| place during a crisis, or was the person put there in a more
| deceptive way?
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Sounds like the premise for a Babylonian fish-out-of-water
| comedy. "It's like Trading Places meets Gilgamesh!"
| pfdietz wrote:
| With lots of Assyrian butt jokes.
| krapp wrote:
| Kra-merggu slides into Jer-ishtal's apartment and exclaims
| "I can't see a thing."
|
| Jer-ishtal looks on bemused, and says "open that one."
|
| _laugh track ensues_
|
| [cut to commercial for Crazy Ea-Nasir's Copper Emporium]
| yyx wrote:
| You can look up Ellen Pao and her time as interim CEO of Reddit
| for recent example.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| In pre-scientific societies, "let's just murder a bunch of
| people and see if it helps" seems to be a surprisingly common
| way of handling all kinds of things. Google "Children of
| Llullaillaco" for an absolutely heartbreaking example of this.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| There is a non-zero chance I will be part of the stand-in
| pool for the USA in the next 4 years :) It's not gonna help
| anything, but you know
| barbazoo wrote:
| They didn't even have a control group?!?
| nico wrote:
| > houses around 130,000 clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia >
| Since so few scholars can read the languages on the tablets--the
| overwhelming majority remain untranslated
|
| This would be an awesome job for AI. Get these scholars to train
| the AI, then have it automatically translate all the other
| tablets
|
| Also, are there online scans of the tablets? Maybe the problem is
| not the scarcity of scholars, but gatekeeping?
|
| On a tangent:
|
| > These tablets, which likely come from Sippar, a Babylonian city
| in modern Iraq, were acquired by the museum more than a century
| ago and date to between 1900 and 1600 B.C.
|
| Is "acquired" a euphemism for stolen here?
| mangamadaiyan wrote:
| How would we know that the AI didn't hallucinate when it
| translated a tablet? In other words, how could one trust the
| translation? A human translator can still provide some
| justification for their interpretation.
|
| Also, "acquired" could simply mean that the museum paid money
| to a third party to, well, acquire the piece(s) in question
| while not inquiring too deeply into how said third party came
| into possession of the objects that they sold.
| bruce511 wrote:
| At the very least one could see from the AI if the tablet is
| interesting or not. That could triage tablets for human
| translation.
| mangamadaiyan wrote:
| Sure, as long as one has some means of predicting the
| probability of false positives as well as false negatives.
| Until then, colour me unconvinced of the (f)utility of this
| approach :)
| timschmidt wrote:
| LLMs do a pretty darn good job of translating other
| languages, even preserving inflection and tone and rhyme
| in some cases. Same when translating programming
| languages. If the training pool is large enough, they
| should be quite good at it.
|
| No problem marking them as machine translated and keeping
| track of which have been spot-checked by experts either.
| Keysh wrote:
| I think "if the training pool is large enough" is a real
| issue here. We're not talking about living languages with
| large, properly attested and annotated corpuses.
|
| Indeed, one of the thing you'd probably like the
| translators to do is identify rare or unique words that
| can be added to our existing knowledge of these
| languages.
| timschmidt wrote:
| > I think "if the training pool is large enough" is a
| real issue here.
|
| It would be really neat to set up something like a wiki
| populated with the existing translations and machine
| translations done via LLM, and to periodically re-train
| the LLM on all the newly manually verified translations
| and automatically re-run the machine translations after.
| The whole thing could move incrementally toward high
| quality output.
| Groxx wrote:
| This is the same thing as trusting its translation though.
| Or worse, since there's more "interpretation" happening (as
| it's basically a summary rather than a whole text, and you
| can't trust either of those steps).
| flir wrote:
| It's like using a classifier to sort biopsies from most-
| likely to least-likely to be Really Bad News. A human
| will get to them all eventually, but you can at least
| fast-track the ones that are almost certainly Really Bad
| News.
|
| (I think I just said "triage" in a lot more words, to be
| honest).
| wood_spirit wrote:
| I remember a time team episode where they found some Ogham
| script on a stone in an early Christian church now on a
| fairway on the isle of Mann.
|
| They got photos to the leading professor in Ogham who
| translated it for them.
|
| I happened to mention this on HN a few months ago in relation
| to something or other, and a commenter replied to me to
| explain that that translation was no longer sound, and the
| current understanding was that the tablet said something
| completely different instead!
|
| (Found the link they gave!
| https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2008/05/throng-of-fifty-
| wa...)
| dghf wrote:
| > Get these scholars to train the AI, then have it
| automatically translate all the other tablets
|
| Which is great until it blithely translates an ancient curse
| and initiates the apocalypse.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Klaatu barada... necktie... neckturn... nickle... noodle...
| It's an N word, definitely an N word.
| technothrasher wrote:
| That's not a curse, that's a 'stand down' instruction. I
| would be much happier to see that, than, say, "Ph'nglui
| mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn".
| dylan604 wrote:
| Unless as protection against hacking attempts at issuing
| the stand down command initiates a curse. After 3
| attempts at the phrase, you must wait 30 seconds before
| your next attempt. After 5 attempts, you are personally
| frozen. After 10 attempts, all stand down instructions
| are wiped and the world is screwed at that point.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| You mean that hasn't already happened? What the hell is going
| on then?
| ben_w wrote:
| Just the usual stuff, unfortunately.
|
| Given how chaotic people are, it's remarkable that millions
| of us working together isn't invariably a constant raging
| dumpster fire, and instead is only a bit of smoke here and
| there that sometimes flares up a bit.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| That's very true. As a child, I was confused by all the
| chaos. Adults seemed to know everything, and yet there
| was constant war and famine and dysfunction all over the
| world. As an adult, I'm confused by the fact that
| anything works at all.
| cindycindy wrote:
| 'Dysfunctionally functional' is probably a term that I
| read elsewhere. It's almost a curse because if things
| were to fully break, then everyone on earth would
| consider that a sufficient wake-up call. Instead, we limp
| along focusing all of our functional resources towards
| our dysfunction, almost like the most proficient addict
| who finds new and inventive ways to fight sobriety. It is
| truly a sight to behold.
| graemep wrote:
| > Is "acquired" a euphemism for stolen here?
|
| Given what and where they were from it almost certainly means
| donated or sold to the museum by the archeologists who
| excavated them in the first place.
| Keysh wrote:
| It sounds like they were excavated in 1881-1882 (e.g.,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sippar#Archaeology) by Hormuzd
| Rassam ("widely believed to be the first-known Middle Eastern
| and Assyrian archaeologist from the Ottoman empire.";
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormuzd_Rassam) working in
| conjunction with the British Museum.
|
| "From 1877 to 1882, while undertaking four expeditions on
| behalf of the British Museum, Rassam made some important
| discoveries. Numerous finds of significance were transported
| to the museum, thanks to an agreement made with the Ottoman
| Sultan by Rassam's old colleague Austen Henry Layard, now
| Ambassador at Constantinople, allowing Rassam to return and
| continue their earlier excavations and to 'pack and dispatch
| to England any antiquities [he] found ... provided, however,
| there were no duplicates.' A representative of the Sultan was
| instructed to be present at the dig to examine the objects as
| they were uncovered."
|
| So, not a euphemism for "stolen".
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Yes but can everyone involved - both the original
| archeologists who excavated them and the people who bought
| them - claim ancestry from whatever ancient society made
| them, or at least the oldest traceable group to have resided
| on that land? AIUI that is how "stolen" tends to be construed
| for archaeological things these days.
| mda wrote:
| See aicuneiform.com
| idoubtit wrote:
| > Also, are there online scans of the tablets? Maybe the
| problem is not the scarcity of scholars, but gatekeeping?
|
| With a few minutes of searching the internet, you would not
| have written that inappropriate question.
|
| Tablets are 3D objects which are most often eroded and broken.
| A plain photography, like one would make for a sheet of paper,
| is useless in the general case. To bring out the cuneiform
| characters, the light must be raking the surface. And don't
| forget that that surface can be concave, and text can go over
| the sides. Most tablets need many photos with different lights.
| It's a long and hard work that is not automated.
|
| Guess what, Scholars have heard about AI. If AI could help them
| publish astonishing papers and push forward their career, do
| you really think they wouldn't rush to it?
| cess11 wrote:
| Have you ever read translations of such ancient texts? Why are
| you so certain there are enough reliable translations to do the
| model training?
|
| Look at https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-
| bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.3.1.2... , for example. To me it doesn't
| come across as something I would expect an LLM to be able to
| produce. They are basically decent at translating between
| certain languages, and only documents that are very formal. As
| soon as metaphor, idioms and so on come up in source texts they
| suck.
|
| There's more translated sumerian you can read here:
| https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/edition2/etcslbycat.php
| alganet wrote:
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-deciphered-4...
|
| > "This eclipse is ... set aside for testing," the newly
| translated cuneiform reads at one point, indicating the need for
| another round of rigorous omen-checking before the future could
| be foretold.
|
| I wonder how would they know if an omen test "passes".
|
| What if these are not omens, but something else? Maybe it was a
| school lesson, and the "set aside for testing" is some teacher
| note. This would not be unusual, as we already know sumerians
| used tablets as school notebooks.
|
| I don't know which parts of these media articles talk about the
| content of the tablet or the interpretation of the scholars. Is
| the thing about entrails on the newly translated tablet itself,
| or is that from another place and the scholars made an
| association?
|
| Again, I would love to be able to read the tablet (digital
| transliteration + translation).
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > "The eclipse of one of the great celestial lights--the sun or
| the moon--meant that on Earth a great figure would be eclipsed,"
| says George. "That is, a king would die."
|
| > the king would go into hiding and a temporary substitute would
| be placed on the throne. Once the threat was deemed to have
| passed, the king would reassume his position. To dispose of any
| lingering evil, his stand-in would then be executed.
|
| I love how people can believe in an all seeing, all knowing, and
| all powerful god and yet also believe that deity can be tricked
| with such an obvious ruse.
|
| I don't know if that's arrogance, stupidity or desperation.
| Perhaps a combination of all three.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| But the Babylonians didn't believe in an all seeing, all
| knowing, all powerful god. They weren't even monotheistic.
| toss1 wrote:
| Still, you'd agree any God that can control the heavens and
| the fate of the earth, if you thought about it for 2 seconds
| would be quite unlikely to be fooled by that ruse, even if
| they are 'only' a lesser God..., right?
| kbelder wrote:
| They probably did the ruse, and it worked. The king lived.
| From that point on, it was a tried and tested solution.
| cam_l wrote:
| It wasn't the god they tricking, it was the populace (and the
| next in line to the throne).
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Remember Prometheus? He stole fire from the gods of Olympus and
| gave it to the humans.
|
| In a different legend the gods held counsel to decide what
| parts of a ritual sacrifice would go to them, and what part to
| the humans. Prometheus gathered up the sacrificed animal's
| bones, polished them with its fat, wrapped them up in its hide
| and presented them to Zeus who was delighted at the artful
| arrangement, apparently, and accepted them in place of the
| bloody and dodgy looking meat and guts of the animal. So the
| humans kept the meat and guts, the gods got the bones.
|
| No wonder Zeus punished Prometheus cruelly, for a thousand
| years until Hercules saved him. You probably know the story -
| rock, chains, eagle, liver, etc.
|
| In yet other legends the gods fought the Titans (Prometheus was
| a Titan), and the Giants. The war with the Giants being
| especially bloody to the point that one Giant caught Zeus and
| cut the nerves from his arms and legs and left him paralysed,
| until Hermes stole the nerves and took them back to Zeus. The
| legend is a bit poor on details regarding how exactly he
| achieved this, but hey, gods.
|
| All this is to say- yeah, the Gods were more powerful than
| humans. They commanded the weather, the sea, the earth and the
| sun; but they weren't omnipotent beings and they weren't even
| the creators of the world. Chaos was the creator of the world.
| Or possibly Chaos and Nyx together. From Chaos sprang Ouranos
| the sky, Gaia, the earth, and everything else in between and
| above. The Olympians came much later. In a sense they were the
| young upstarts. Zeus ... well, _maimed_ his own father. Who had
| been eating all his children. So that how Zeus became king of
| the gods: he usurped his Dad and fought two big wars against
| other pretenders to the throne.
|
| The Moirai -the Fates- were more powerful than Zeus, and all
| the other Gods: whatever the Fates decided, happened. When the
| Fates decided Hercules, the son of Zeus, would die, nothing
| Zeus could say or do would change their mind. Hercules died,
| and in a horrible, gruesome manner.
|
| The gods were not omnipotent. Not the Olympians. Not,
| apparently, those of the Babylonians also. But their stories I
| don't know (I grew up in Athens, not Babylon).
| pwillia7 wrote:
| how do we feel about messing with history trying to repair broken
| statues? https://imgur.com/a/sAeWnCp
| harywilke wrote:
| There is a really excellent podcast on the history of astronomy
| called The Song of Urania[0] that goes into a ton of depth about
| eclipses and how different cultures viewed and recorded the
| events of the sky. [0]https://songofurania.com/
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