A Social Network of the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire DATA PAPER CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Heidi Jauhiainen Department of Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland heidi.jauhiainen@helsinki.fi KEYWORDS: social network analysis; prosopography; social structure; Assyria; Assyriology; cuneiform TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Jauhiainen, H., & Alstola, T. (2022). A Social Network of the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 8: 8, pp. 1–8. DOI: https://doi. org/10.5334/johd.74 A Social Network of the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire HEIDI JAUHIAINEN TERO ALSTOLA ABSTRACT The dataset is a social network of over 17,000 individuals who lived during the so-called Neo-Assyrian period of Mesopotamian history, primarily in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. The undirected network of individuals connected by co-occurrences in cuneiform documents was semi-automatically extracted from the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. In addition to two weighted versions of the one-mode co-occurrence network, the dataset also contains a two-mode person-text network and rich metadata for each individual. For the first time, the dataset allows large- scale computational analysis of social structures in the Assyrian Empire. The data is primarily stored as plain text and CSV files, inviting scholars to further expand and enrich it. The scripts and files used for creating and standardizing the data are also available in the Zenodo repository. *Author affiliations can be found in the back matter of this article mailto:heidi.jauhiainen@helsinki.fi https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.74 https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.74 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8227-5627 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4382-1733 2Jauhiainen and Alstola Journal of Open Humanities Data DOI: 10.5334/johd.74 (1) OVERVIEW REPOSITORY LOCATION https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5862904 CONTEXT This dataset is a social network of over 17,000 individuals attested in cuneiform documents from the Neo-Assyrian period, primarily in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. The data originates from the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (PNA), which has been available only as a printed edition (Radner & Baker, 1998–2011). Heather D. Baker’s Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire Online project1 has the long-term goal of making the PNA data digitally available, but it currently provides only additions and corrections to the printed PNA volumes. We extracted the data from the text and PDF file versions of the PNA that we received from Simo Parpola, the Editor-in-Chief of the series. The dataset published here was produced for the research purposes of the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires (University of Helsinki). (2) METHOD STEPS The earlier PNA volumes (1/I–3/I) were available to us as plain text files that were used to typeset the printed publications. As the last volume (3/II) was laid out using different software, it was available to us only as a PDF file. We wrote a number of scripts in Java to extract and process the data. Their source codes are available in the repository. Entries in the PNA consist of two parts (see Figure 1): 1) an entry starts with a personal name and its linguistic analysis; and 2) then follows a list of the individuals who used this name. In some cases, there is only a single person who used a name, whereas some names were borne by dozens of people. It is often not entirely clear if two or more cuneiform texts refer to the same person or several homonymous individuals. In the PNA, the decision to connect an attestation of a name to a historical individual is made by a trained Assyriologist. We followed these identifications but could not take their level of uncertainty into account, although this is sometimes expressed in the PNA. For each individual, the PNA provides a short description (e.g., “Individual from Assur (reign of Sennacherib)” or “Tammaritu II, king of Elam c. 652–649 (reign of Assurbanipal)”), followed by the attestations of this person in texts and a short description of the person’s role in each text. The dataset was produced in four steps. In steps one and two, we worked with the text files, because their structure was ideal for automated processing. First, we extracted the names of the Neo-Assyrian cuneiform documents in which persons are attested. The document names were indicated by “@@” at the beginning of a line in the text files (see Figure 1). Since the PNA was published over a period of thirteen years and the entries were written by numerous scholars, there are inconsistencies in how the documents are referred to. Several typing errors were also detected. Furthermore, only some of the document names indicate where the name of the document ends and a possible line number starts. Using rules and reference lists, we compiled a list that connects standardized document names to the original “@@” lines in the text files. In step two, individual persons were extracted from the text files with the name of each document they were attested in. It was not possible to collect information about the individual’s role in a document, because this is given in unstructured running text. Homonymous individuals were distinguished by consecutive numbers added after their names (e.g., Aššūr-iddin_1), following the numbering of individuals in the PNA. The general description and dating of each individual as well as the language and gender of the name were also extracted. It can be very difficult to assign a language and gender to an ancient name (PNA 1/I, p. xxii; Földi, 2019), and some analyses given in the PNA could be contested. As with all other data, we simply extracted the information as it is in the PNA. 1 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/pnao/. https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.74 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5862904 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/pnao/ 3Jauhiainen and Alstola Journal of Open Humanities Data DOI: 10.5334/johd.74 In the third step, we extracted information from the PDF version of the last PNA volume. As preprocessing, we opened the file in a Safari browser and copied the text into Microsoft Word, an operation that kept the formatting of the font style. Entries for personal names and individuals could be identified and were marked before turning the file into plain text. Copying the text from two columns of the PDF file resulted in many inconsistencies, and the new text file was manually curated before information about documents and individuals was extracted. Entries for document names could not be identified in the structure of the PDF file, and the identification and extraction of documents is thus based on concordance lists and document names attested in other PNA volumes. Finally, we created a two-mode network of persons and texts and a one-mode network of all individuals. Both networks are undirected. In the two-mode network, persons were connected to the texts in which they are attested. The one-mode network connects two persons if they are attested in the same document (Figures 2 and 3). Isolates (persons without any connections) were not included in the network. There are two versions of the one-mode network: one uses the number of co-occurrences as edge weights, and another one calculates the edge weights in relation to the total number of persons appearing in the same document (see below). As the PNA entries for Assyrian kings do not include all their attestations in the extant texts, we collected their attestations from the State Archives of Assyria book series and the corresponding online editions from the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc). We also supplied some metadata for individuals in the one-mode network. In addition to the unique id number, each *A@@u_r-re_mu_ti_ ("A@@ur is my mercy"); Akk.; masc.; wr. [1]=a@-@ur--rem2-ut-tu, 1=a@-@ur--rem2-u-te; AHw 971. Individual from Assur (reign of Esarhaddon and early reign of Assurbanipal): 1=--rem2-u-t[e] acts as a witness @@As8617b S002 (675); [1]=a@-@ur---tu is mentioned in a broken legal document of unclear function @@SAAB 5 40 002 (date lost); The name of a witness acting for Abba^, 1=a@-@ur--re, is incomplete due either to a mistake of the writer of the tablet or the modern copyist (the tablet is unaccessible). The name is followed by the curious phrase @a AN`E=KUR.RA-ME` ta-da-na-ma. @@Rfdn 17 05 S001 (666). Even though the restoration as A@@u_r-re_mu_ti_ seems to be likely because of the space available and chronological reasons, there are other possibilities: A@@u_r-re_htu-u$ur (but the name seems to be too long), A@@u_r-re_manni (in a rarely used spelling variant) or A@@u_r-re_$u_wa (as suggested by Ahmad [1996] 223. However, the only attestation of the latter in Assur is as the recipient of the letter @@As13846q). <