To learn more about semantic networks, please visit ANEE Lexical Networks v. 2.0.
All words in Akkadian (Number of nodes: 1,230)
All words in English translation (Number of nodes: 1,230)
Only proper nouns (Number of nodes: 117)
All words excluding proper nouns (in Akkadian) (Number of nodes: 1,061)
All words excluding proper nouns (in English translation) (Number of nodes: 1,061)
The networks are based on almost 6,100 legal and administrative texts from Babylonia. The texts have been primarily written in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, but a number of Hellenistic texts are included as well. The texts have been automatically lemmatized at the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires. See section Datasets and scripts for links to the data.
The networks are created using similarity scores from pointwise mutual information (PMI) as edge weights. We used dictionary forms (lemmas) of the words and included only those words that occur at least five times in the corpus. Collocates had to occur at least twice to be included. We included only nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and excluded personal names. There are altogether 1,230 words that meet these criteria. For a more thorough explanation of our methods, see ANEE Lexical Networks v. 2.0.
Cite portal
Tero Alstola, Aleksi Sahala, Jonathan Valk, Matthew Ong, and Sam Hardwick. 2025. Neo-Babylonian Lexical Networks. http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2025052001.
Cite specific lexical network
Tero Alstola, Aleksi Sahala, Jonathan Valk, Matthew Ong, and Sam Hardwick. 2025. Neo-Babylonian Lexical Networks. See esp. “[title of the network].” http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2025052001.
Example: To cite the network “All words in Akkadian,” use citation: Tero Alstola, Aleksi Sahala, Jonathan Valk, Matthew Ong, and Sam Hardwick. 2025. Neo-Babylonian Lexical Networks. See esp. “All words in Akkadian.” http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2025052001.
Cite data used to create these networks
Tero Alstola, Aleksi Sahala, Jonathan Valk, Matthew Ong, and Sam Hardwick. 2025. Neo-Babylonian Lexical Networks – the dataset. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15355779.
A User Guide, videos, help, and FAQs are available for the ANEE Lexical Portal Help Page.
The networks available on this page were created using the following datasets:
The texts are also available on Korp:
The networks were created using the following scripts:
The Achemenet Babylonian texts originate from the Achemenet project. Achemenet provides transliterations and translations of documents written in the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550-330 BCE). Our data provides a snapshot of the Babylonian cuneiform texts available on Achemenet in December 2020. We thank our colleagues at Achemenet for the permission to lemmatize the texts and publish them online.
Babylonian Administrative and Legal Texts (BALT) originate from several sources. More than half of the transliterated texts are legacy data of the late János Everling, who was one of the pioneers in making transliterated cuneiform texts available online. The other texts have been transliterated by Johannes Hackl, Bojana Janković, Michael Jursa, Yuval Levavi, Martina Schmidl, and Caroline Waerzeggers, whom we thank for the permission to publish their texts online. Some metadata was created using data from the NaBuCCo project. We thank Kathleen Abraham, Michael Jursa, and Shai Gordin for giving us access to this metadata.
The texts have been automatically lemmatized at the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires (University of Helsinki), funded by the Research Council of Finland (decision numbers 298647, 330727, and 352747). Linda Leinonen, Matias Sakko, Senja Salmi, and Repekka Uotila assisted in cleaning the data and creating metadata. We thank Niek Veldhuis (Berkeley) and Heidi Jauhiainen (Helsinki) for their help at various stages of the project.