Neo-Assyrian Imperial Religion Counts: A Quantitative Approach to the Affiliations of Kings and Queens with Their Gods and Goddesses

This repository contains the data used for and generated during our research for the article "Neo-Assyrian Imperial Religion Counts: A Quantitative Approach to the Affiliations of Kings and Queens with Their Gods and Goddesses" by Amy Gansell, Tero Alstola, Heidi Jauhiainen, and Saana Svärd, published in the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 24 (2024), 236-274, https://doi.org/10.1163/15692124-12341349.

In the article, we study the relationships between Neo-Assyrian deities, kings, and queens. Our text data on kings comes from the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc). After preprocessing our dataset, we analyzed 575 texts in which at least one king and one deity co-occur within a window of ten words. These texts come from the Oracc projects RINAP, RIAo, RIBo, and SAAo. The connections between queens and deities were collected manually.

The folders in this repository contain the following:

Kings: Files that relate to the textual dataset on kings and deities, including various statistics and the text file from which we extracted the co-occurrences of kings and deities within a window of ten words.

OraccData: Oracc texts and their metadata converted to .tsv files.

Queens: Data used for analyzing the co-occurrences of queens and deities, including some statistics.

Standardization: Lists used for standardizing proper nouns in the textual data.

Tables: Full versions of the tables that are published in a shortened form in the article.

We gratefully acknowledge that our research has been funded by the Academy of Finland (decision numbers 298647, 312051, and 330727). Our research data originates from the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc). We thank Oracc for their efforts in making linguistically annotated cuneiform texts available online. We are indebted to everyone who has been involved in creating this research data, including the authors of the original publications and the researchers who have made the data Oracc-compatible and enriched it through lemmatizations and by adding other metadata (for a list of projects and their contributors, see the file OraccCredits.txt). In the context of this article and dataset, we want to acknowledge the work of the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (PIs Karen Radner and Jamie Novotny) and the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period project (PI Grant Frame) in particular. We thank Jamie Novotny for making the royal inscriptions of Sargon II from the RINAP 2 project available to us before their publication. We thank Aleksi Sahala for support with the Pmizer tool and running the first co-occurrence lists, Johannes Bach for helping to develop the rules to replace first person verbs and pronouns, Repekka Uotila for help with preliminary analysis of our data, and Shana Zaia for feedback on earlier drafts of the article.