Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

Summary

The cuneiform tablet with the newly discovered hymn. Credit: Anmar A. Fadhil, Department of Archaeology, University of Baghdad, with the permission of the Iraqi Museum and the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage In the course of a collaboration with the University of Baghdad, LMU's Enrique Jiménez has rediscovered a text that had been lost for a thousand years. A paper on this discovery is published in the journal Iraq. "It's a fascinating hymn that describes Babylon in all its majesty and gives insights into the lives of its inhabitants, male and female," says Jiménez. Babylon was founded in Mesopotamia around 2000 BCE. Once the largest city in the world, it was a cultural metropolis in which works were written that form part of our global literary heritage today. Babylonian texts were composed in cuneiform writing on clay tablets, which have survived only in fragments. One of the goals of the collaboration with the University of Baghdad is to decipher hundreds of cuneiform tablets from the famous Sippar Library and preserve them for posterity. Legend has it that Noah hid them here from the floodwaters before boarding the ark. 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. "Using our AI-supported platform, we managed to identify 30 other manuscripts that belong to the rediscovered hymn—a process that would formerly have taken decades," says Jiménez, Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Literatures at LMU's Institute of Assyriology. Thanks to these additional texts, the scholars were able to completely decipher the hymn of praise on the clay tablet, parts of which were missing. Hymn offers new insights into Babylonian urban society These numerous additional copies suggest that the text was very widespread at the time. "The hymn was copied by children at school. It's unusual that such a p...