The project plans to analyze available digital resources for the three millennia of available cuneiform written evidence (c. 3,000 BCE - 100 CE). It will use both measurable statistical methods, as well as cutting-edge explainable machine learning models such as variational auto encoders (VAEs), to bridge the gap between macro and microhistory. The goal of the research is to examine case studies situated between the historian's desire to find general explainable patterns and the desire for high resolution evidence of events. The first case study of the project is the analysis of cuneiform tablet shapes and their relationship to historical date, genre, and archival context.
Publications:
Ong, M., and Sh. Gordin (2024). Neo-Assyrian Metaphors through the Telescope: Linguistic Patterns involving Body Part Constructions in the State Archives Letter Corpus. Asia Anteriore Antica 6, pp. 43–61.
Gordin, Sh., Alper, M., Romach, A., Senz, L., Yochai, N., and R. Lalazar (2024). CuReD: Deep Learning Optical Character Recognition for Cuneiform Text Editions and Legacy Materials. In: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Machine Learning for Ancient Languages (ML4AL), 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), Kerrville, TX: Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI: (WOS: Linguistics, Computer Science, CORE: A*)
Kapon, D., Fire, M. and Gordin, S. (2024).
Shaping History: Advanced Machine Learning Techniques for the Analysis and Dating of Cuneiform Tablets over Three Millennia.
Hamplová, A., Romach, A., Pavlíček, J., Veselý, A., Čejka, M., Franc, D. and Sh. Gordin (2024).
Cuneiform stroke recognition and vectorization in 2D images. Digital Humanities Quarterly 18/1, (IF 0.8, JR 71/419, Q1)
Barker, E., Palladino, C. and Sh. Gordin (2024).
Digital Approaches to investigating Space and Place in Classical Studies. The Classical Review, 74(1), pp. 1–19. DOI:10.1017/S0009840X23002858. (IF 6, JR 60/63, Q4, Vatat Ranking: B)
Ong, M. and Sh. Gordin (2024). Linguistic Annotation of Cuneiform Texts using Treebanks and Deep Learning. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 39/1, 296–307, DOI: (IF 1.1, JR 47/419, Q1) (see PDF attached, its not open access sadly)
Ong, M., and Sh. Gordin (2024).
A Survey of Body Part Construction Metaphors in the Neo-Assyrian Letter Corpus. Journal of Open Humanities Data 10/1, 10, DOI: (IF 0.3, JR 167/419, Q2)
Howland, M. D., Tauxe, L., Gordin, Sh., Altaweel, M., Cych, B., and E. Ben-Yosef (2023).
Exploring Geomagnetic Variations in Ancient Mesopotamia: Archaeomagnetic Study of Inscribed Bricks from the 3rd-1st Millennia BCE. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 120/52, e2313361120, DOI:
Clark, S. and Sh. Gordin (2023) The Mesopotamian Ancient Place-Names Almanac (MAPA):
A Gazetteer of the Uruk Urbanscape in the Age of Empires. Journal of Open Humanities Data 9/20, p. 1-5. DOI: (IF 0.3, JR 167/419, Q2)