A Survey of Body Part Construction Metaphors in the Neo-Assyrian Letter Corpus

The dataset consists of approximately 2,400 examples of metaphors in Akkadian of what we term Body Part Constructions (BPC's) within the letter sub-corpus of the State Archives of Assyria online (SAAo). The dataset was generated by a multi-step process involving the training and application of a spaCy language model to the SAAo letter sub-corpus, converting the resulting annotations to linked open data format amenable to searching for BPC’s, and manually adding metalinguistic data to the search results; these files, in CONLLU and TTL formats, as well as the model specific files based on spaCy's requirements, are also made available in this publication. The BPC dataset is stored as a CSV file, and can serve as an easy starting place for other scholars interested in finding socio-linguistic usage patterns of this construction.

The royal archives of the late Neo-Assyrian kings (8th-7th century BCE) constitute an important source for understanding many facets of the Neo-Assyrian empire. Ranging from treaty tablets and legal documents to prophecies, ritual instructions, and even court literature, the approximately five thousand texts in this corpus primarily come from the palatial complex at Nineveh and document the reigns of Sargon II (r. 721-705), Sennacherib (r. 704-681), Esarhaddon (r. 680-669), and Assurbanipal (668-627). Over the past four decades, much of these archives has been published in the State Archives of Assyria (SAA) volumes at the University of Helsinki, and in more recent years has appeared digitally under the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (LMU Munich) as the SAAo.