[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.