On 120 tablets already dated, the system places the published year at the top of its ranking in 96% of cases, and proposes candidate dates for 56 undated texts so far.
The Babylonian Astronomical Journals record the state of the sky for nearly six centuries, but many broken tablets have lost the formula that indicated their date. So far, specialists have dated them one by one, comparing the observations described with other clues such as the names of kings. A team including Lucas Pinheiro and Yuan-Sen Ting proposes to automate the astronomical part of this work, with the same rules for all tablets.
Analyze, verify, compare to calculated sky
A rule-based analyser first cuts observations into short standard statements; A language model compares them to the text and adds those that have escaped the parser. Astronomical tools then test each of these statements over the 701 years ranging from 626 B.C. to 75 A.D., and classify the years according to their concordance. To avoid bias, the system has access to published dates only after its results have been frozen, and each proposal refers to the passages and calculated positions that justify it.
Of the 120 tablets already dated by the reference edition, the published year is one of the top rankings in 96% of the cases; For 86 of them, only one year comes out, and it's the right one for 84. The system also provides a ranking of candidate years for 56 undated entries from the fourth volume of the edition, and an interactive page allows you to follow tablet reasoning by tablet.
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