[saas_sam]

There actually are...

"There are far more of these tablets in existence than I could have imagined. In fact, between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000–100,000 have been read or published."

https://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbou....

[oh_sigh]

And those are just the tablets we've found. It's quite likely there are millions of other tablets just sitting in caves and and old, buried cellars waiting to be excavated. There are nowhere near enough Assyriologists in the world to even think about handling how many tablets we have access to, let alone the new ones we will find in the future, so machine translation will be a huge boon to the field, even if the translations are a little bit iffy.

Right now, Assyriologists will prioritize - if the tablets come from, say, someone's old garage, they are unlikely to be translated. If it comes from a palace or a temple, then the odds are better. But imagine the situation where someone ended up with a copy of the Declaration of Independence in their garage.

[CSSer]

I feel like this must be a really rewarding time to be alive for diligent archivists and demotivated researchers alike. I hope the revelation that proper cataloging could mean that it's (once again?) possible for single researchers or small teams to make discoveries and then immediately see their findings reverberate in a virtual instant throughout their field (as updated data sets are used to re-calibrate models) could serve as an incentive for better data collection and management too.