Contents Modelling of Neo-Sumerian Ur III Economic Text Corpus

Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008), pages 369–376 Manchester, August 2008 Contents Modelling of Neo-Sumerian Ur III Economic Text Corpus Wojciech Jaworski Institute of Informatics Warsaw University Banacha 2, 02-097 Warsaw, Poland wjaworski@mimuw.edu.pl Abstract This paper describes a system for process- ing economic documents written in the an- cient Sumerian language. The system is application-oriented and takes advantage of the simplicity of ancient economy. We have developed an ontology for a selected branch of economic activities. We trans- late the documents into a meaning repre- sentation language by means of a semantic grammar. The meaning representation lan- guage is constructed in a way that allows us to handle massive ambiguity caused by: the specifics of the Sumerian writing sys- tem (signs’ polyvalence, lack of mid-word signs), our incomplete knowledge of the Sumerian language and frequent damages of documents. The system is augmented with the capability of processing docu- ments whose parts describe concepts not included in the ontology and grammar. As an effect we obtain a structural description of the documents contents in the mean- ing representation language, ready to use in historical research. 1 Introduction Sumerians lived from prehistoric times until late 3rd millennium BC in lower Mesopotamia (mod- ern Iraq). Sumer was the first highly developed ur- ban civilisation, which used cuneiform script. Dur- ing the period of the 3rd dynasty of Ur (2100 BC- 2000 BC), whose power extended as far as present c⃝ 2008. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported li- cense (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). Some rights reserved. Iraq and western Iran, the state introduced a cen- trally planned economy with an extensive bureau- cratic apparatus. Civil servants reported on clay tablets agri- culture and factory production, lists of worker salaries, summaries of executed work, distribution of commodities, goods, animals etc., lists of sac- rificed animals, travel diets and other economical information. Archaeologists dug out about 100000 of tablets from that period (known also as the Neo-Sumerian period). The corpus of 44365 tablets (as of March 26, 2008) is available in electronic version in the database of Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI, 2006), run by the University of California in Los Angeles and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Tablets are stored in the form of Latin transliteration, often accompanied by pho- tographs or drawings (which are irrelevant for us). Economic documents are an essential source of information about ancient Sumer. The corpus con- tains crucial information about economic, social and political history of the state, as well as its po- litical system and administration structure. The sources of this type provide the most complete in- formation about the daily life of those days. For more information about the economy of the Ur III kingdom see for example (Stepien, 1996; Shar- lach, 2004; Steinkeller, 1987). As more and more Neo-Sumerian economic documents were published, the problem arose of searching for documents relevant to the investi- gated topic, and the problem of representing the content of a large number …

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