Shai Gordin

Ariel University · Land of Israel and Archaeology

Cuneiform tablets, emerging in ancient Mesopotamia around the late fourth millennium BCE, represent one of humanity's earliest writing systems. Characterized by wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, these artifacts provided insight into Mesopotamian civilization across various domains. Traditionally, the analysis and dating of these tablets rely on s...

The classification of cuneiform signs according to stylistic criteria is a difficult task, which often leaves experts in the field disagree. This study introduces a new publicly available dataset of cuneiform signs classified according to style and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) approaches to differentiate between cuneiform signs of the two mai...

Imagine a student reading Odysseus’ Cretan tale at Odyssey 19.172–84. When faced by a string of unfamiliar names – in addition to ‘native Cretans’, there are Achaeans, Cydonians and Dorians, as well as the individuals Minos, Deucalion, Idomeneus and the speaker, Aethon (Odysseus in disguise) –, they use their digital edition to find out more about...

This study presents 32 high-resolution geomagnetic intensity data points from Mesopotamia, spanning the 3rd to the 1st millennia BCE. These data contribute to rectifying geographic disparities in the resolution of the global archaeointensity curve that have hampered our understanding of geomagnetic field dynamics and the viability of applying archa...

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)...

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...

Optical character recognition for ancient non-alphabetic scripts Cuneiform is one of the earliest writing systems in the world, invented at the end of the fourth millennium BCE. It is usually written by pressing a stylus on moist clay tablets, creating a three-dimensional script. The script is logo-syllabic, like the Chinese or Japanese writing sys...

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 bet...

Hittite Logograms and Hittite Scholarship. By mark WeedeN. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten, vol. 54. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011. Pp. xvii + 693. €128.

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 S...

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 w...

Significance 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...

The main source of information regarding ancient Mesopotamian history and culture are clay cuneiform tablets. Despite being an invaluable resource, many tablets are fragmented leading to missing information. Currently these missing parts are manually completed by experts. In this work we investigate the possibility of assisting scholars and even au...

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...

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...

Summary 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: Bab...

Laurie E. Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch: Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer. (Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology 28.) xlii, 322 pp. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2014. £45. ISBN 978 1 9343 0957 5. - Volume 79 Issue 1 - Shai Gordin

This study explores the personal copyist statement in the tablet colophons, the scribes who appear in them and the tablets' findspots in order to demonstrate the relationships between text, scribe and the scholarly work environment of Hattusa in the late Empire period (second half of the 13 th cent. BC). It is initially demonstrated how Hittite scr...