From Wikipedia: That seems an incredible trove of knowledge. We should Human Genome/Google Books those tablets. mike, I recall you had done some cuneiform math exercises before?Between half a million[2] and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000[3] – 100,000 have been read or published.
Holy crap, that's a lot of unread texts. We definitely should automate translating those. These date back some 8000 years. I've seen some with advanced mathematics and great thinking ... what else could be on them? Certainly a lot of crap (Ahab owes me a sheep) but also certainly a big window to ancient thinking.
100,000 short texts might not be enough to do machine translation, if the parallel texts are even available in a machine-readable form. Wikipedia says these people are trying to post utf-8 texts of 50,000 tablets, so if anyone were going to try it they'd the ones to start with... but they seem to think File Maker Pro's proprietary file format is a good way to exchange data, so they couldn't make it less inviting to play with if they tried.
I know the Greeks came close with some geometry problems, as well. I wonder if they and others failed to make the next step because they lacked a place value math, which allows for easier algebra. I also wonder whether we would have advanced much farther, much faster had any of these civilizations made those connections.
Hell, the Greeks had steam engines. I get the picture that if the Greeks had a bit of a shove, they could have triggered an industrial revolution all the way back in 200BC. I can see using something like this to power a war trireme, for example. That creates a demand for coal, and demand for coal is one of the major shoves that factored into the steam engine's adaptation.