This repository contains data and code to run a stylometric analysis on orthographical variants in Neo-Assyrian sale documents from the 9^th^-7^th^ centuries BCE.
Wherever the Neo-Assyrian empire had established its holding, official sale documents were likely to follow suit. Cuneiform sale documents are found as far away from the Assyrian heartland as Southern Anatolia, one of the characteristics of the empire's cultural influence and control. Given their geographical range, these documents are remarkably consistent in their overall structure, attested for a period of ca. 250 years.
The Archival Texts of the Assyrian Empire (ATAE) corpus on ORACC, published three years ago, enriches the previous ORACC projects devoted to Neo-Assyrian period, primarily the SAAo and RINAP projects, by digitizing significantly more texts in other Assyrian capitals and peripheral settlements besides the main center of Nineveh, Kuyunjik. This corpus expands the number of Neo-Assyrian sale documents available for digital study.
| Total | Land Sales | Slave Sales | Unknown Sales | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assyrian heartland | Kuyunjik (Nineveh) | 508 | 239 | 181 | 88 |
| Qalat Sherqat (Assur) | 171 | 47 | 94 | 30 | |
| Nimrud (Kalhu) | 155 | 71 | 63 | 21 | |
| Balawat (Imgur-Enlil) | 6 | 4 | 2 | 0 | |
| Dur-Katlimmu | Tell Sheikh Hamad (Dur-Katlimmu) | 164 | 47 | 72 | 45 |
| Western periphery | Tell Shiukh Fawqani (Burmarina) | 32 | 3 | 9 | 20 |
| Kahramanmaraş (Marqasu) | 20 | 3 | 17 | 0 | |
| unknown (Ma'allanate) | 18 | 6 | 12 | 0 | |
| Tell Ahmar (Til Barsip) | 5 | 0 | 3 | 2 | |
| Tell Halaf (Guzana) | 3 | 0 | 3 | 0 | |
| Zinčirli (Samal) | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | |
| Sultantepe (Huzirina) | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | |
| All Sale Documents | 1085 | 420 | 459 | 206 |
While the majority of the texts are from the 7^th^ century, the earliest document is dated to 844 BCE, the reign of Shalmaneser III, from the North-West palace at Kalhu. The latest sale documents are four land sale texts dated to the reign of the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, from 603 to 600 BCE, and were discovered in the Assyrian empire's center on the Habur river, Dur-Katlimmu (BATSH 37-40, P527162, P527163, P527164, P527165).
The sale documents republished here are from SAA 6 and 14 and from ATAE. The texts are based on data collected, prepared, managed, and maintained by the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), led by Karen Radner and Jamie Novotny.
The texts are published as word-level CSV documents.
Description in progress...