Only about a dozen people alive today can fluently read Old Assyrian cuneiform. This non-commercial project builds on the work of scholars and open-data initiatives who have spent decades making the ancient record accessible.
This project was inspired by the Deep Past Initiative and the Deep Past Challenge on Kaggle, which seeks to unlock 22,000+ Old Assyrian cuneiform tablets using machine learning.
The translation model powering this site was trained as part of my entry in that competition.
The stories on this site are original fiction based on the Old Assyrian merchant archive excavated at Kültepe (ancient Kaneš), dating to c. 1950–1750 BCE. All personal names, transactions, quoted tablet formulas, and trade details are attested in real clay tablets — the oldest private correspondence in human history.
Trade route geography follows the archaeological record of the Kültepe/Kanesh merchant colony archives and modern scholarship on the Ashur–Kaneš caravan network (c. 1950–1750 BCE).
Sign values and transliteration conventions reference the CDLI sign list.
Free reuse with attribution • cdli.earth
The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus and the electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (Steve Tinney, Philip Jones, Niek Veldhuis) provided sign-value verification and glossary data.
CC BY-SA 3.0 • oracc.org
Rykle Borger, Mesopotamisches Zeichenlexikon, AOAT 305 (Ugarit-Verlag, 2nd ed. 2010). Referenced for cuneiform sign readings.
The eBL project (LMU Munich, Prof. Enrique Jiménez et al.) provided lexical data used in training.
Data: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 • Code: MIT • DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10018951
Terrain tiles by Stadia Maps and Stamen Design, with data from OpenStreetMap contributors. Fallback tiles by Esri.
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