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pyaegean

A specialist Python toolkit for Ancient Greek — alphabetic Greek and the Aegean syllabic scripts (Linear A / Linear B). pyaegean focuses narrowly and deeply on Greek and the Aegean world: a script-agnostic corpus data layer, the analytical methods from the Linear A Research Workbench, translation, and a pluggable multi-provider AI layer. The excellent CLTK already serves many ancient languages broadly; pyaegean is intentionally narrower, and uses CLTK as a friendly benchmark to measure its Greek coverage against.

Status: v0.2.0 (alpha). The script-agnostic core and Linear A are fully implemented; the Greek NLP track is a full pipeline — including an opt-in Perseus AGDT treebank backend (attested lemmas + gold POS/morphology), LSJ glossing, a baseline dependency parser, and a CLTK benchmark harness — and the multi-provider AI layer + hybrid translation are implemented. Analytical and generative output on the undeciphered Linear A material is exploratory — see Data & Provenance.

New here?

• Never used Python? Start with Getting Started — it walks you from "I have nothing installed" to your first result, no prior programming assumed.
• Want to learn by doing? The Tutorial answers two real research questions end to end — one in Linear A, one in Greek.
• Something not working? See the FAQ & Troubleshooting.

Quick start

import aegean

corpus = aegean.load("lineara")          # 1,721 inscriptions, bundled, offline
print(len(corpus))                       # 1721

ht = corpus.filter(site="Haghia Triada") # filter by metadata (site name)
df = corpus.to_dataframe(level="word")   # pandas-native, one row per word

from aegean.analysis import balance_check, word_matches_sign_pattern
checks = balance_check(corpus.get("HT13"))          # KU-RO accounting reconciliation
hits = [w for w, _ in corpus.word_frequencies()
        if word_matches_sign_pattern(w, "KU-*-RO")] # wildcard sign search

from aegean import greek
greek.betacode_to_unicode("mh=nin")          # 'μῆνιν'
greek.syllabify("ἄνθρωπος")                  # ['ἄν', 'θρω', 'πος']
greek.accentuation("λόγος").classification    # 'paroxytone'

What's here

Module	What it does
aegean.core	Script-agnostic model: Corpus, Document, Token, Sign, SignInventory, Numeral, the Script plugin registry, provenance
Linear A	Bundled 1,721-inscription corpus, 84-sign inventory, sign→sound map, transliteration
Analysis	Accounting reconciliation, sign-pattern search, phonetic distance/alignment, morphology clustering, collocation stats, query engine, structure detection
Greek NLP	Beta Code↔Unicode, tokenize, syllabify, accent & prosody, metrical scansion, reconstructed IPA, POS tagging, morphological analysis, lemmatize; opt-in Perseus-treebank lemmas/POS (use_treebank), LSJ glossing (use_lsj), a baseline dependency parser (use_parser), and a CLTK benchmark harness
AI Layer	Multi-provider clients (Anthropic/OpenAI/Grok/Gemini), grounding, caching, exploratory-labeled capabilities, hybrid translation
Data & Provenance	Bundled data, download-to-cache, citation/licensing

Install

pip install pyaegean            # core + Linear A + Greek
pip install "pyaegean[ai]"      # + Anthropic / OpenAI / Grok / Gemini clients
pip install "pyaegean[all]"     # everything

See Installation for the full extras matrix, and Development to build from source and run the test suite.

Roadmap

Shipped: v0.1 core + Linear A + Greek start. v0.2 (current): multi-provider AI layer + translation, and deep Greek NLP — treebank lemmas/POS, LSJ glossing, a baseline dependency parser, and a CLTK benchmark harness (treebank mode ties CLTK on lemma and edges it on POS on the gold set). Next: v0.3 a larger, in-context CLTK evaluation (full First1KGreek/Perseus corpus + grown gold) → v0.4 Linear B (DAMOS/LiBER) → v0.5 Cypriot/Cypro-Minoan → v1.0 stable.

License

Apache-2.0. Corpus data is GORILA (Godart & Olivier 1976–1985) via mwenge/lineara.xyz; facsimile imagery © École Française d'Athènes (referenced, not redistributed). See Data & Provenance.