Bad Moon Rising
49 comments
·January 8, 2025hnlmorg
cam_l
It wasn't the god they tricking, it was the populace (and the next in line to the throne).
olddustytrail
But the Babylonians didn't believe in an all seeing, all knowing, all powerful god. They weren't even monotheistic.
toss1
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
They probably did the ruse, and it worked. The king lived. From that point on, it was a tried and tested solution.
YeGoblynQueenne
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 with Eros. 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, Kronus (time?). Who had been eating all his children. So that's how Zeus became king of the gods: he usurped his Dad and fought two big wars against other pretenders to the throne. Hardly omnipotent. But very powerful nonetheless.
The Moirai -the Fates- were more powerful than Zeus, and all the other Gods combined: 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).
hnlmorg
That’s an excellent counterpoint. I guess when viewed from that perspective then it’s a little less surprising that kings felt they could trick their gods.
Thanks for sharing :)
nico
> 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?
dghf
> 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
Klaatu barada... necktie... neckturn... nickle... noodle... It's an N word, definitely an N word.
technothrasher
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".
YeGoblynQueenne
Does it work that way? Is a curse actually cast if it is a machine reading its text rather than a human?
Can machines curse?
timschmidt
This is a question addressed in https://unsongbook.com/
InsideOutSanta
You mean that hasn't already happened? What the hell is going on then?
ben_w
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.
mangamadaiyan
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.
wood_spirit
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...)
YeGoblynQueenne
If it wasn't an LLM that found the professor's mistake then the point I think you're trying to make is, well, missing the point: a human made a mistake, and humans found out and corrected it. The question is what happens when LLMs make mistakes. Will people still be careful enough to catch and correct them, as often as we find and correct the mistakes we make ourselves? Or will our ability to do so be overwhelmed by the extreme rate at which LLMs can generate text?
bruce511
At the very least one could see from the AI if the tablet is interesting or not. That could triage tablets for human translation.
Groxx
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).
mangamadaiyan
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 :)
graemep
> 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
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
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.
idoubtit
> 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?
mda
See aicuneiform.com
cess11
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
starluz
[dead]
LeonenTheDK
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
Sounds like the premise for a Babylonian fish-out-of-water comedy. “It’s like Trading Places meets Gilgamesh!”
yyx
You can look up Ellen Pao and her time as interim CEO of Reddit for recent example.
InsideOutSanta
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
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
They didn't even have a control group?!?
alganet
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).
harywilke
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/
pwillia7
how do we feel about messing with history trying to repair broken statues? https://imgur.com/a/sAeWnCp
> “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.