This repo is about the digital processing of the transliterations of cuneiform tablets from the Old Babylonian periods.
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 Babylonian letters (AbB) (1900-1600 BC) as the second corpus for testing our approach. This is cuneiform corpus of ca. 1300 documents (tablets and envelopes) with legible inscriptions.
The first cuneiform corpus that we have brought into Text-Fabric is the proto-cuneiform Uruk 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 two
searches: one with AbB in the Primary publication field and one with the same string
in the Secondary publication(s) field. In both searches we entered
Old Babylonian 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.
We have checked the conversion from the ATF transliterations to Text-Fabric thoroughly. An account of the checking that we performed is in the checks notebook.