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Abstract
Cuneiform is one of the earliest writing systems in recorded human history (ca. 3,400 BCE–75 CE). Hundreds of thousands of such texts were found over the last two centuries, most of which are written in Sumerian and Akkadian. We show the high potential in assisting scholars and interested laypeople alike, by using natural language processing (NLP) methods such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), to automatically translate Akkadian from cuneiform Unicode glyphs directly to English (C2E) and from transliteration to English (T2E). We show that high-quality translations can be obtained when translating directly from cuneiform to English, as we get 36.52 and 37.47 Best Bilingual Evaluation Understudy 4 (BLEU4) scores for C2E and T2E, respectively. For C2E, our model is better than the translation memory baseline in 9.43, and for T2E, the difference is even higher and stands at 13.96. The model achieves best results in short- and medium-length sentences (c. 118 or less characters). As the number of digitized texts grows, the model can be improved by further training as part of a human-in-the-loop system which corrects the results.

Before Writing, Volume 1: From Counting to Cuneiform. Denise Schmandt‐Besserat. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. 288 pp.Before Writing, Volume 2: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens. Denise Schmandt‐Besserat. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. 452 pp.

Optical character recognition for ancient non-alphabetic scripts
Cuneiform is one of the earliest writing systems in the world, invented at the end of the fourth millennium BCE. It is usually written by pressing a stylus on moist clay tablets, creating a three-dimensional script. The script is logo-syllabic, like the Chinese or Japanese writing systems, meaning the same sign can be read logographically, as a word, as syllables, or as determinatives (ie semantic classifiers). The correct reading depends on the context. There are close to a thousand cuneiform signs, not all of which were used simultaneously; usually about 200-300 signs were used at once. This article shows Shai Gordin, Senior Lecturer at Digital Pasts Lab in Ariel University, look at the deciphering of ancient non-alphabetic scripts, and the technology we use to understand it.

Let's hope for fulfilment of the prophecy that was written in cuneiform on a clay tablet in ancient Babylon: 'The gods have grown angry at Babylon. The end of the world is approaching. Children have ceased to obey their parents. And everyone wants to write a book'. The following speech, slightly edited here, was given at the conference in Denmark in March 1988.

This paper examines from an accounting perspective recent work by Nissen et al. [1993], here regarded as an extension of the archaeological research of Schmandt-Besserat [1977, 1992] and its analysis by Mattessich [1987, 1994]. The transition from the 4th millennium b.c. to the 3rd millennium b.c. featured the use of protocuneiform and cuneiform accounting techniques to replace the older token accounting. This research reinforces the previously made hypothesis [Mattessich, 1987] that the inserting of tokens into a clay container during the last phase of token accounting corresponded to debit entries, while the impressing of tokens on the surface of the container was meant to convey the credit total of an equity. Similarly, in proto-cuneiform bookkeeping, debit entries appear again on one side while the credit total appears on the reverse side, but this time on the clay tablets. Yet, the research also leads to the hypothesis that the "closed double-entry system" of token accounting could not be maintained in the archaic bookkeeping of the subsequent period where, apparently, a debit/credit scheme was used in which only some but not all entries had counter-entries. Finally, the paper illustrates important labor production aspects of archaic bookkeeping and cost accounting which are contrasted to modern budgeting and standard costing.

Among the Achaemenid inscriptions, DPg has been the topic of several studies since the very beginning of cuneiform studies. The photographs prepared by the DARIOSH (Digital Achaemenid Royal Inscription Open Schema Hypertext) project at L'Orientale University of Naples shed light on some ambiguities of this specific inscription and led to the proposal of a new text edition of DPg. The purpose of this article is to follow the whole history of studies on DPg until today and then propose a new reading of the inscription and a discussion of related issues, including its unique creation formula and orthography.