Books by Shai Gordin
Studied in Ancient Near Eastern Records 27, 2021
Numbered Tablets in the Persepolis Fortification Archive "Evidence on the numbering of tablets" w... more Numbered Tablets in the Persepolis Fortification Archive "Evidence on the numbering of tablets" wrote Richard T. Hallock in the introduction to his magisterial edition of 2,087 Elamite documents from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, "is scanty." He listed three documents called first (Elamite appukana) tablets (
Cuneiform was not just a writing system, it was a culture. The attributes of this “Babylonian” cu... more Cuneiform was not just a writing system, it was a culture. The attributes of this “Babylonian” culture expanded to all reaches of the ancient Near East in the course of the second millennium BCE. Hittite scribes adopted and adapted this writing culture to their own needs sometime during the 16th century BCE. In this book I analyse texts from dozens of Hittite scribes copying, editing and writing up cuneiform manuscripts on clay in Hattusa, the capital of the Late Bronze Age Hittite Empire in Anatolia. Beside identifying their manuscripts, I place the scribes in their social and official setting and study the principal elements of their handwriting, in an attempt to identify scribal schools and writing habits, as well as advance our tools for forensic handwriting recognition. The book also contains studies of external features of clay tablets (diplomatics), editions of many colophons and related textual passages on scribes, and a look at scribal signatures and their nature as markers of authorship and scribal specialisation.
Links were added to book reviews by:
G. Torri 2017 (WZKM)
Y. Feder 2017 (RBL)
Ancient writing systems employ logographic and logophonetic principles playing on the relationshi... more Ancient writing systems employ logographic and logophonetic principles playing on the relationship between writing, script and scribal learning. The workshop proceedings published in this volume explore the way these relationships encode knowledge and meaning reflected in the social, historical and cultural mentalité of the early peoples of East Asia (China and Japan), Anatolia, the Aegean, Egypt and Mesoamerica. The meeting was organized in the FU Berlin on the fall of 2010 by the editor and Dr. Renata Landgráfová (now Charles University, Prague) in the frame of the DFG research training group 1458 “Notational Iconicity” (“Schriftbildlichkeit”) headed by Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum and Sybille Krämer.
Editorship of collective volumes by Shai Gordin
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 19, 2019
Archiv für Orientforschung 54, 197–232, 2021
A Digital Ancient Near East: Challenges and Opportunities
H2D: digital humanities journal 3/1, 2021
Refereed articles in journals and conferences by Shai Gordin
Land
We produce results that bridge the gap between physical and textual study of the ancient Mesopota... more We produce results that bridge the gap between physical and textual study of the ancient Mesopotamian landscape in the region south and west of the city of Uruk (Biblical Erech, Modern Warka). A brief survey of gazetteers of Mesopotamia, volumes listing place-names drawn from translated and published cuneiform texts from the 2nd and 1st Millennium BCE, are presented. The various gazetteers were reviewed for relevant place-names, and the results were recorded and analyzed. These are described in detail below, as are their implications. The resulting data are then compared to the results of a recently completed archaeological survey of the same region. The synthesis of textual and archaeological surveys indicates a more exacting methodology to add geographic objectivity to textual results, while connecting physical results to the qualitative detail available within the Uruk textual record. More broadly, we demonstrate how long-term historical records align with archaeological data, de...
PNAS Nexus
Cuneiform is one of the earliest writing systems in recorded human history (ca. 3,400 BCE–75 CE).... more Cuneiform is one of the earliest writing systems in recorded human history (ca. 3,400 BCE–75 CE). Hundreds of thousands of such texts were found over the last two centuries, most of which are written in Sumerian and Akkadian. We show the high potential in assisting scholars and interested laypeople alike, by using natural language processing (NLP) methods such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), to automatically translate Akkadian from cuneiform Unicode glyphs directly to English (C2E) and from transliteration to English (T2E). We show that high-quality translations can be obtained when translating directly from cuneiform to English, as we get 36.52 and 37.47 Best Bilingual Evaluation Understudy 4 (BLEU4) scores for C2E and T2E, respectively. For C2E, our model is better than the translation memory baseline in 9.43, and for T2E, the difference is even higher and stands at 13.96. The model achieves best results in short- and medium-length sentences (c. 118 or less characters). As...
Optical Character Recognition for Complex Scripts: A Case-study in Cuneiform (long paper)
DH 2022, Tokyo, Japan 25-29 July 2022, 2022
This proposal provides an innovative method for developing machine learning models for OCR of the... more This proposal provides an innovative method for developing machine learning models for OCR of the cuneiform script, an ancient, low-resource and complex logo-syllabic writing system. Our approach combines human-in-the-loop methodologies with an online tool in a way that benefits both scholars and training machine learning models effectively.
Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities, 2022
This paper presents ACCWSI (Attentive Context Clustering WSI), a method for Word Sense Induction,... more This paper presents ACCWSI (Attentive Context Clustering WSI), a method for Word Sense Induction, suitable for languages with limited resources. Pretrained on a small corpus and given an ambiguous word (a query word) and a set of excerpts that contain it, ACCWSI uses an attention mechanism for generating context-aware embeddings, distinguishing between the different senses assigned to the query word. These embeddings are then clustered to provide groups of main common uses of the query word. We show that ACCWSI performs well on the SemEval-2 2010 WSI task.
ACCWSI also demonstrates practical applicability for shedding light on the meanings of ambiguous words in ancient languages, such as Classical Hebrew and Akkadian. In the near future, we intend to turn ACCWSI into a practical tool for linguists and historians.
Can God Deliver His Servants? Two Theological Problems in the Daniel Narratives (Dan 1:9; 3:17–18)
Vetus Testamentum, 2021
This article addresses two cases from the narratives in Daniel in which a similar theological que... more This article addresses two cases from the narratives in Daniel in which a similar theological question arises concerning the uncertainty of God’s ability to deliver his servants: (1) The chief officer’s denial of Daniels’ request (Dan 1:10) despite the fact that God granted Daniel grace and compassion from the chief officer, and (2) the speech of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Dan 3:17–18), in which they entertain the possibility that God will not, or perhaps cannot, save them. Commentators and translators throughout the generations have struggled with these theological problems, and we can identify a clear trend seeking to read the relevant verses in a way that removes the uncertainty, replacing it with certain faith in God’s deliverance.
In this article, we demonstrate how this interpretive trend surprisingly continues even with modern biblical scholars. Based on a literary analysis, we suggest that reading the MT version without altering it to conform with certain theological preconceptions may shed new light on the Daniel narratives, thereby exposing their deep and complex message.
PLOS ONE 15(10), 2020
In this paper we present a new method for automatic transliteration and segmentation of Unicode c... more In this paper we present a new method for automatic transliteration and segmentation of Unicode cuneiform glyphs using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Cuneiform is one of the earliest known writing system in the world, which documents millennia of human civilizations in the ancient Near East. Hundreds of thousands of cuneiform texts were found in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries CE, most of which are written in Akkadian. However, there are still tens of thousands of texts to be published. We use models based on machine learning algorithms such as recurrent neural networks (RNN) with an accuracy reaching up to 97% for automatically transliterating and segmenting standard Unicode cuneiform glyphs into words. Therefore, our method and results form a major step towards creating a human-machine interface for creating digitized editions. Our code, Akkademia, is made publicly available for use via a web application, a python package, and a Github repository.
Restoration of fragmentary Babylonian texts using recurrent neural networks
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (37), 2020
The documentary sources for the political, economic, and social history of ancient Mesopotamia co... more The documentary sources for the political, economic, and social history of ancient Mesopotamia constitute hundreds of thousands of clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script. Most tablets are damaged, leaving gaps in the texts written on them, and the missing portions must be restored by experts. This paper uses available digitized texts for training advanced machine-learning algorithms to restore daily economic and administrative documents from the Persian empire (sixth to fourth centuries BCE). As the amount of digitized texts grows, the model can be trained to restore damaged texts belonging to other genres, such as scientific or literary texts. Therefore, this is a first step for a large-scale reconstruction of a lost ancient heritage.
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 19, 35-54, 2019
The paper is constructed around a short micro-historical portrait of a priestly family active in ... more The paper is constructed around a short micro-historical portrait of a priestly family active in Uruk in the sixth century bce. This introduces two interrelated issues that the paper will subsequently discuss with a view towards a contextualization of the family in question: the interaction between the Neo-Babylonian state and priests outside the capital city, and the drive towards inter-temple interaction and standardization of procedures based on the model of Esangila, the Marduk temple in the capital.
Aula Orientalis 37/1: 41-51, 2019
The administration of cult and wool industry in the Neo-Babylonian Eanna temple in Uruk gave outp... more The administration of cult and wool industry in the Neo-Babylonian Eanna temple in Uruk gave output to several thousands of cuneiform records. Chief among them lists, receipts, and notations for incoming and outgoing goods of various kinds. The collections of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology and the Oakland Museum of California house some 241 cuneiform artefacts from the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods. Most of them belong to the administrative record of Eanna. The present contribution offers edition and commentary of five unpublished representative documents of Eanna administrative practices from these collections, and discusses their contribution to the known corpus. This is an initial step towards the full publication of 69 previously unpublished texts from these collections.
Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, 2018
The paper addresses Nebuchadnezzar’s removal from office of the High Priest of Uruk’s main temple... more The paper addresses Nebuchadnezzar’s removal from office of the High Priest of Uruk’s main temple, the Eanna, during a formative period of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The incident is tied historically and politically to the process of state building and imperial consolidation associated with this monarch, especially in the second quarter of the 6th century b.c.e., at the Neo-Babylonian empire’s “Augustan Threshhold.”
"That thy children shall come again to their own border": A New Look at the Social Geography of the Cyrus Declarations for Babylonia and Judea (Hebrew article), Judea and Samaria Research Studies 27/2, 125-156
Judea and Samaria Research Studies, 2018
The article explores the socio-historical geography of the Cyrus Declarations for the return of s... more The article explores the socio-historical geography of the Cyrus Declarations for the return of several peripheral communities and rebuilding of their respective temples in Babylonia and Judah, respectively. Still uncritically cited as unique expressions of Cyrus’s benevolence, it has been long known that the Achaemenid ruler issued these and other political manifests to promote his paternalistic image based on earlier imperial Mesopotamian forerunners. Building on historical, archival and archaeological data, I emphasize the significance of the Trans-Tigridian corridor and Judah as borderland communities located on the margins of imperial centers. This analysis suggests that Cyrus’s imperial vision was to create a network of nodes designed to function as transportation support centers and supply posts for the traffic from Iran to the Egyptian border.
Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, 2018
In this article we deal with Nebuchadnezzar’s removal from office of the High Priest of Uruk’s ma... more In this article we deal with Nebuchadnezzar’s removal from office of the High Priest of Uruk’s main temple, the Eanna, during a formative period of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The incident is tied historically and politically to the process of state building and imperial consolidation associated with this monarch, especially in the second quarter of the 6th century b.c.e., at the Neo-Babylonian empire’s “Augustan Threshhold.”
Keywords: Neo-Babylonian State Building, Uruk, Eanna Archives, Priestly Families, Nūr-Sîn Family
A Glimpse into the Šumu-libši Archive: The Sociohistorical Context of a Prebend Sale from the E-kar-zaginna of Ea in Babylon and Related Texts. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 107/1 (2017): 111-124
CT 51, 56 (BM 34545) is a prebend sale from the E-kar-zaginna temple in Babylon within the Šumu-l... more CT 51, 56 (BM 34545) is a prebend sale from the E-kar-zaginna temple in Babylon within the Šumu-libši family. It is suggested here that the prebend belonged to a lamentation singer (kalû) and was inherited by his son, who sold it because he became an exorcist (mašmaššu) rather than a kalû. Some of the protagonists and witnesses in the sale
belonged to the circles of well known urban families, among them the Egibis and members of the clergy. In addition to another promissory note (BM 34536), CT 51, 56 constitute a fragment of a yet unknown archive of the Šumu-libšis, a family of the minor clergy in Babylon.
Interested can contact me at [email protected]
The Cult and Clergy of Ea in Babylon. Die Welt des Orients 46/2 (2016): 177–201
In late first-millennium Akkadian names, the imperial deities of the Neo-Babylonian state were gi... more In late first-millennium Akkadian names, the imperial deities of the Neo-Babylonian state were given preference over the ancient revered triad of the “great gods” Anu, Enlil, and Ea. Among these three gods, the cult of Enki/Ea is the most perplexing during this late period. On the one hand, his importance is attested in cult and ritual: Babylon contained numerous shrines to Ea, including a temple, the E-kar-zaginna, in the precinct of Marduk’s great temple, the Esagil. On the other hand, he nearly vanishes from the onomasticon of given names, with the exception of some fossilized ancient family names and the personal names of close to two hundred individuals, mostly from the city of Babylon between the accession year of Nebuchadnezzar II and the thirty-second year of Darius I. This article traces the different forms of Ea worship reflected in literary and archival sources, as well as in name-giving practices. Its first part deals with the socio-religious interplay between Sin and Ea, which gave rise to the use of ancestral names in specific urban kinship groups that revered these deities.
Beginning in the Old and Middle Babylonian periods, these families spread from Nippur and the south of Babylonia (i.e. the “Sealand”) and eventually settled in Babylon and nearby cities, where we find many of them well established in the long sixth century (620–484 BCE).
In the second part of the article I investigate several such families that exhibit consistent traits of Ea worship or a relation to Ea’s cult across several generations.
(Please email me for a copy)
Uploads
Books by Shai Gordin
Links were added to book reviews by:
G. Torri 2017 (WZKM)
Y. Feder 2017 (RBL)
Editorship of collective volumes by Shai Gordin
Refereed articles in journals and conferences by Shai Gordin
ACCWSI also demonstrates practical applicability for shedding light on the meanings of ambiguous words in ancient languages, such as Classical Hebrew and Akkadian. In the near future, we intend to turn ACCWSI into a practical tool for linguists and historians.
In this article, we demonstrate how this interpretive trend surprisingly continues even with modern biblical scholars. Based on a literary analysis, we suggest that reading the MT version without altering it to conform with certain theological preconceptions may shed new light on the Daniel narratives, thereby exposing their deep and complex message.
Keywords: Neo-Babylonian State Building, Uruk, Eanna Archives, Priestly Families, Nūr-Sîn Family
belonged to the circles of well known urban families, among them the Egibis and members of the clergy. In addition to another promissory note (BM 34536), CT 51, 56 constitute a fragment of a yet unknown archive of the Šumu-libšis, a family of the minor clergy in Babylon.
Interested can contact me at [email protected]
Beginning in the Old and Middle Babylonian periods, these families spread from Nippur and the south of Babylonia (i.e. the “Sealand”) and eventually settled in Babylon and nearby cities, where we find many of them well established in the long sixth century (620–484 BCE).
In the second part of the article I investigate several such families that exhibit consistent traits of Ea worship or a relation to Ea’s cult across several generations.
(Please email me for a copy)