# Language models and astronomical tools for text dating

The Babylonian Astronomical Diaries record the sky for nearly six centuries, and many broken tablets have lost their date formula, which specialists previously dated one tablet at a time by comparing the surviving observations with computed phenomena. The new system turns observations into fixed-field clauses with a rule-based parser, has a language model check them against the text and add missed ones, and tests the clauses in all 701 years from 626 BCE to AD 75. On 120 dated tablets with decisive clauses, the top-ranked group contains the published year in 96% of cases; for 86 of them the group is a single year, the published year in 84.

The Babylonian Astronomical Diaries record the sky for nearly six centuries, and many broken tablets have lost their date formula, which specialists previously dated one tablet at a time by comparing the surviving observations with computed phenomena. The new system turns observations into fixed-field clauses with a rule-based parser, has a language model check them against the text and add missed ones, and tests the clauses in all 701 years from 626 BCE to AD 75. On 120 dated tablets with decisive clauses, the top-ranked group contains the published year in 96% of cases; for 86 of them the group is a single year, the published year in 84.