Modeling Network Connections of the Settlements from the Cuneiform Map CBS 10434

Description

Abstract (En)

This poster presents my work in progress, which is a part of my doctoral research on the rural settlements of the Nippur province during the Middle Babylonian period (1595-1155 BCE). It focuses on modeling network connections between settlements depicted on the Kassite cuneiform map CBS 10434 and other settlements co-attested with them in the archival administrative documents. The modeling is conducted with the help of Gephi software, which allows to visualize settlement network connections, trace their frequency, and identify network clusters that could be representing agricultural or taxation units.

Cuneiform map CBS 10434 from the collection of Penn Museum is one of the few examples of visual representations of the ancient settlements, fields, and canals that are mentioned in the documents from the Kassite Nippur and Dūr-Enlillē archives. Many of these documents are records of taxation, storage, and disbursement of agricultural produce, predominantly barley. Only three of the settlements depicted on the map, Tukultī-Ekur, Kār-Nuska, and Dimtu, which located in the area enclosed by canals and a borderline, are co-attested, i.e., appear together in the same documents, while none of the other geographical features shown on the map, except for the canal Tukultī-Ekur, are co-attested with them. At the same time, Tukultī-Ekur, Kār-Nuska, and Dimtu are often found in tabular compound accounts with other recurring settlements that are not depicted on CBS 10434, e.g., their annual revenues in barley and other crops are accounted together with those of several additional places. I consider these co-attestations to be meaningful and showing the connections between the settlements at least from the point of view of the administrative system that produced these documents. They display certain patterns that provide insights into the economic and geographical connectivity of the settlements and the way ancient bureaucrats saw the provincial agricultural landscape from the administrative perspective.

The social network model, where nodes stand for settlements and edges for connections between them represented by their co-attestations, is a productive research tool that makes evident particular clusters of a larger administrative and agricultural area stretching beyond the limits of the territory depicted on the map CBS 10434. It adds a degree of certainty to the disjoined attestations of the settlements, which were provincial agricultural producers, in the textual corpuses and brings relative historical geography of the Kassite Nippur region one step closer to the absolute one.