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Hymn to Babylon: readable again thanks to AI

28 Jul 2025

The hymn of praise to Babylon was last read 2,000 years ago. Now LMU Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Literatures Enrique Jiménez has rediscovered the lost text with the help of AI.

Together with Anmar Fadhil, Assyriologist at the University of Baghdad, Enrique Jiménez was able to decipher the hymn of praise to the city of Babylon. The text was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and has survived only in fragments. In the electronic Babylonian Library platform, Enrique Jiménez is digitizing all cuneiform text fragments that have been discovered worldwide to date, and using artificial intelligence to decipher fragments that belong together. One of the goals of the collaboration with the University of Baghdad is to decipher hundreds of cuneiform tablets from the famous Sippar Library.

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2:36 | 28 Jul 2025

Their research also has personal meaning for scholars in Iraq: “Colleagues from Babylon, who still call themselves Babylonians, came up to us later and told us: You make us proud to be Babylonians,” reports Jiménez.

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