This repo is about the digital processing of the transliterations of cuneiform tablets from the Old Assyrian period.
Cuneiform tablets have been photographed, and transliterated in ATF files, in which the marks on a tablet are represented by ASCII characters.
While the ATF descriptions preserve an awesome amount of precise information about the marks that are visible in the clay and their spatial structure, it is not easy to process that information. Simple things are hard: counting, aggregating, let alone higher level tasks such as clustering, colocation, and other statistical operations.
That is why we have converted the transliterations to an other format, Text-Fabric , which is optimized for processing, adding data and sharing it.
We have chosen the Old Assyrian documents (2000-1600 BC) as the third corpus for testing our approach. This is cuneiform corpus of ca. 4775 documents (tablets and envelopes) with legible inscriptions.
The previous cuneiform corpora that we have brought into Text-Fabric are:
- proto-cuneiform Uruk corpus.
- cuneiform OldBabylonian corpus.
We have downloaded transliterations and images from the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative CDLI. It has compiled a rich source of data, available to the public, visible on its website, and large portions are conveniently downloadable. We are indebted to the creators and maintainers of the CDLI website.
On the search page we performed a
search with Old Assyrian in the Chronology - period field.
On the results page, we have chosen Download all text.
The downloaded files contain metadata and transliterations.
We use a dozen or so of the metadata fields, but the focus is on the transliterations.
We have a specification of the transcription format and how we model the text in Text-Fabric.