01-07-2025
Hymn of Babylon pieced together using AI after 2,100 years
I n the dying days of Babylon, about 100BC, as the remnants of the city's former splendour crumbled around them, its young scribes would study a thousand-year-old poem about the marvel that their civilisation had once been.
Set at the dawn of creation, the hymn to the god Marduk described a verdant paradise of flowering meadows nourished by the River Euphrates, a sacred metropolis with jewelled gates 'flourishing in her charms like a garden of fruit'.
This lost classic of Mesopotamian literature has now largely been reconstructed by scholars, who used artificial intelligence to piece together fragments of 30 ancient clay tablets.
The hymn's origins are obscure but a fleeting reference to tolerance for foreign exiles suggests it may have been written before the 13th century BC. That would put it a little before the Trojan war and about the same time as the youngest parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest long poem known to modernity.
