Poem about Ancient Babylon Discovered and the Marduk-Gate

This is the Marduk Gate of the ancient city of Babylon, one of the world’s oldest urban settlements and now a UNESCO heritage site. King Nebuchadnezzar II built this gate about 575 BCE. Whatever beauty it contains now, where it lies in lonely ruins some 85 km south of Baghdad, is nothing compared to the splendor of its heyday. Thanks to advancements in AI, however, a new poem about the city has been discovered and even translated into English. It deals with the coming of springtime to Babylon:

“(The river of Babylon,) Arahtu is its name, (crafted by Nidimmud, the lord of wisdom,) waters the pasture, soaks the reed-thicket,/

Pours its waters into sea and lagoon. Its fields sprout new growth, in its meadows, aglow, barley springs up./

Thanks to its flow, mounds of grain are piled high, the grassland grows tall, for flocks to roam and graze./

It multiplies, lavishes, and showers the land with wealth and splendor — what benefits mankind.”

This poem and thousands of potential other texts are just now being made available through a digitized database of all surviving cuneiform tablets — this means the system of writing that emerged out of Ancient Mesopotamia, which is extremely challenging to decipher due to the script and the fact that these tablets are scattered all over the world in various degrees of intactness, can be available to the public. Called the Fragmentarium, the database also runs an AI algorithm that can piece together distinct tablets from all over and assemble them with likely matches.

The Fragmentarium can act like a bookend with chatGPT and similar AI, binding the history of the written word across time.