Ancient-Bench: A Comprehensive Multi-millennial, Multi-medium, and Multi-script Benchmark for Ancient Chinese Artifact Text Recognition

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🚨 Important Notice / 核心声明

[EN] Strictly for Academic Research Use Only.
The images in Ancient-Bench are curated from publicly accessible archives of official museums, libraries, and cultural heritage institutions. The dataset creators claim no copyright over the source images. Any commercial exploitation is strictly prohibited. Users must comply with the copyright guidelines of the originating institutions.

[ZH] 本数据集仅限非商业学术研究使用。
Ancient-Bench 数据集所收录图像均源自各大国家级博物馆、图书馆等公开发布的数字化文博资源。作者团队不拥有亦不转让任何原始图像版权。严禁用于任何商业营利行为。

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📌 Dataset Summary

Ancient-Bench (Accepted by EMNLP 2026) is the first comprehensive benchmark for ancient Chinese artifact text recognition, featuring:

• Multi-millennial: Spans over 3,000 years (1200 BCE – 1911 CE) across 3 distinct historical epochs.
• Multi-medium: Encompasses 9 artifact types (Oracle Bones, Bronzes, Bamboo/Wooden Slips, Silk Manuscripts, Seals, Steles, Cliff Inscriptions, Ancient Editions, and Calligraphy).
• Multi-script: Covers all 7 canonical historical script styles (Oracle Bone, Bronze, Seal, Clerical, Regular, Cursive, and Running script).
• Standardized Protocols: Establishes unified standards for medium-specific symbols, paleographic transcriptions (隶定), variant characters, and hierarchical layout parsing.

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📊 Dataset Statistics

The benchmark contains 2,700 meticulously annotated high-resolution images from 14 national-level cultural institutions:

Medium Category	Number of Images	Resolution Range (px)	Chars / Image	Covered Scripts
Oracle (甲骨)	300	600×800	1–68	Oracle Bone Script
Bronze (青铜器/金文)	250	41×80 – 1024×1024	1–77	Bronze Script
Slip (简牍)	300	29×224 – 700×6820	1–107	Seal, Clerical Script
Silk (帛书)	300	46×124 – 1330×2067	1–784	Seal, Clerical Script
Seal (印章)	350	100×150 – 1333×1341	1–40	Oracle, Bronze, Seal Script
Steles (碑帖墓志)	300	85×155 – 5795×16745	4–816	Seal, Clerical, Regular, Running
Cliff (摩崖石刻)	200	183×113 – 7300×5760	2–216	Seal, Clerical, Regular, Running
Edition (古籍刻本)	300	751×506 – 970×2817	4–776	Seal, Clerical, Regular, Cursive, Running
Calligraphy (书法手迹)	400	303×509 – 4802×13385	2–1666	Bronze, Seal, Clerical, Regular, Cursive, Running
Total	2,700	41×80 – 5795×16745	1–1666	All 7 Scripts

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🚀 How to Download & Access

1. Direct Download via Python (Hugging Face)

You can download the dataset archive using the huggingface_hub Python library:

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

zip_path = hf_hub_download(
    repo_id="hiuyi/Ancient-Bench",
    filename="Ancient-Bench.zip",
    repo_type="dataset",
    local_dir="./",
)

print(f"Dataset downloaded to: {zip_path}")