The Key to the City: Using Digital Tools to Understand Tablet Provenience

Abstract

Abstract Assyriologists have a variety of methods available to assign unprovenienced materials with educated certainty to its ancient site. The occurrence of specific toponyms and month names as well as the detailed study of prosopography, paleography, orthography, lexicography, tablet shape, format and sealing practices assist specialists in reconstructing the ancient context of a specific object. Now, with the fluorescence of technology, new digital tools are being developed and refined that may contribute to the complex process of provenience assignment. Text mining, the practice of deriving information from blocks of text using pattern recognition or trend analysis, has already been applied to corpora ranging from Shakespeare to Twitter. For an example of previous text mining analysis on cuneiform sources, see, ENEA’s TIGRIS Virtual Lab (http://www.afs.enea.it/project/tigris/indexOpen.php) With the ability to search for statistically significant correlations in large blocks of text following user-defined criteria and rules, statistical methods, here accessed via text mining software, have significant potential for revealing new levels of data in cuneiform texts.