Linguistically Annotated Achemenet Babylonian Texts

This repository contains automatically lemmatized Babylonian cuneiform texts from the Achemenet project (http://www.achemenet.com/). Achemenet provides transliterations and translations of documents written in the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550-330 BCE). The repository 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. We have converted the Achemenet transliterations into Oracc atf, and we are naturally responsible for any errors introduced into the transliterations during the conversion. We also thank Niek Veldhuis (Berkeley) and Heidi Jauhiainen (Helsinki) for their help at various stages of the project.

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. The texts are also available on Korp (http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023062102). Korp allows extensive searches on the texts and presents the results as a KWIC concordance list. It also offers statistical information on the search results and enables the user to download them.

The zip file Achemenet contains the annotated texts and the file Scripts contains the Python scripts used for converting files (XLSX/HTML > ATF > CONLLU > VRT). 

For further information on the dataset, see Alstola, T., Sahala, A., Valk, J., & Ong, M. (2026). Semi-Automatic Annotation of Babylonian Cuneiform Texts. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 12(41). https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.494.