Rebuilding the Oldest Archive in the History of Mankind in Digital Form
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-11-04

The paper provides an overview of the Ebla Digital Archives Project, which focuses on a group of roughly 3.000 cuneiform tablets from Tell Mardikh (ancient Ebla, in western Syria), dated to the middle of the third millennium BCE. The documents cover a large variety of topics: deliveries of silver and gold, textiles, work management, agriculture, animal husbandry, international treaties, letters, vocabularies, literary compositions, ritual texts, etc. The presentation focuses on the digital methodologies developed in order to address the peculiar nature of these challenging sources, whose understanding – despite of the good progress made in the past decades – is still a work in progress. Languages (Sumerian, Old-Akkadian, Eblaite), script, and writing system of the Ebla texts are in fact incompletely understood. This situation pushes us to consider a number of different strategies and ad-hoc solutions in order to properly capture the complex nature of the documents, including: the development of a simple mark-up language, used to encode input transliterations; scripts in Python, Perl, and PhP, which parse input transliterations and populate a database; a PostgreSQL database, as main tool for data queries, with dedicated annotation and editing capabilities; N-gram modeling used to spot incoherent data within transliterated texts, as well as to offer hints on possible restorations of broken passages; network analysis, used to evaluate prosopographical connections within the archives, which in turn may help in the reconstruction of the internal chronology of the texts, as well as of the administrative patterns subsumed in the archives.

Full title: Rebuilding the Oldest Archive in the History of Mankind in Digital Form: the Ebla Digital Archives Project 

(Massimo Maiocchi)