File size: 5,028 Bytes
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dataset_info:
features:
- name: text_id
dtype: string
- name: sent_id
dtype: string
- name: volume
dtype: string
- name: sentence_idx
dtype: int32
- name: text
dtype: string
- name: tokens
struct:
- name: id
list: string
- name: form
list: string
- name: lemma
list: string
- name: upos
list: string
- name: xpos
list: string
- name: feats
list: string
- name: head
list: string
- name: deprel
list: string
- name: designation
dtype: string
- name: ancient_author
dtype: string
- name: ancient_recipient
dtype: string
- name: archive
dtype: string
- name: collection
dtype: string
- name: provenience
dtype: string
- name: genre
dtype: string
- name: dialect
dtype: string
- name: language
dtype: string
- name: period
dtype: string
- name: ruler
dtype: string
- name: script
dtype: string
- name: object_type
dtype: string
- name: material
dtype: string
- name: museum_no
dtype: string
- name: date_of_origin
dtype: string
- name: has_date
dtype: string
- name: vol_title
dtype: string
- name: primary_publication
dtype: string
splits:
- name: train
num_bytes: 23684474
num_examples: 7355
download_size: 20030844
dataset_size: 23684474
configs:
- config_name: default
data_files:
- split: train
path: data/train-*
license: cc-by-4.0
language:
- akk
task_categories:
- token-classification
tags:
- akkadian
- assyriology
- cuneiform
- ancient-near-east
- dependency-parsing
- conllu
- glam
- cultural-heritage
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
---
# State Archives of Assyria — Morphosyntactic Letter Corpus
7,355 fully annotated sentences from **2,586 Neo-Assyrian letters** — the royal
correspondence of the Assyrian empire, 8th–7th century BCE.
Every sentence carries full morphosyntactic annotation (lemma, UPOS, morphological
features, dependency head and relation) **and** the letter's archival context: who wrote it,
who received it, which archive it was excavated from, and where.
Row 0 is Adda-hati writing to the king, from the Northwest Palace at Nimrud:
> `ana šarri bēlīya urdaka Adda-hati` — *"To the king, my lord: your servant Adda-hati."*
## Fields
- `tokens` — `{id, form, lemma, upos, xpos, feats, head, deprel}` (CoNLL-U)
- `text` — the normalised sentence
- `text_id` (ORACC/CDLI P-number), `sent_id`, `volume` (`saa01`–`saa21`), `sentence_idx`
- Letter metadata joined from the ORACC catalogue: `ancient_author`, `ancient_recipient`,
`archive`, `collection`, `provenience`, `genre`, `dialect`, `language`, `period`, `ruler`,
`script`, `object_type`, `material`, `museum_no`, `date_of_origin`, `designation`,
`vol_title`, `primary_publication`
Covers 10 of the 21 SAA volumes. All 2,586 letters join to a catalogue record.
## Notes on the conversion
Two quirks of the deposit are handled here, and are worth knowing if you go back to the source:
- The deposit ships a `concatenated/` directory holding 10 per-volume merged files — **the
same letters again**, in UD-release form. They are excluded; including them would double
the corpus.
- The `*Renumbered` files open with a provenance pseudo-sentence (`saao / saa01 / P224395`,
tokenised but unlemmatised). These are dropped — they are not sentences of the letters.
Filenames in the source are not uniform (`P<id>lookup`, `P<id>Renumbered`,
`P<id>lookupRenumbered`, `P<id>_lookup`, `P<id>_intermediate`, plus a few `X`/`Q` ids), so
text ids are extracted by pattern rather than by stripping suffixes.
## Caveats
- Akkadian is a **broken-text** tradition. Damaged/illegible signs appear as `x` runs in the
text; they are preserved, not cleaned.
- Annotation quality descends from ORACC's lemmatisation; `xpos` and `feats` are sparse in
some volumes.
## Load
```python
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("biglam/state-archives-assyria-letters", split="train")
# letters from one excavated archive, with their ancient sender
nimrud = ds.filter(lambda r: r["provenience"] and "Nimrud" in r["provenience"])
print(nimrud[0]["ancient_author"], "->", nimrud[0]["ancient_recipient"])
```
## Source & credit
Matthew Ong. *A Full Morphosyntactic Annotation of the State Archives of Assyria Letter
Corpus.* Zenodo, 2024-02-06. <https://zenodo.org/records/10622984> — deposit CC-BY-4.0.
Underlying text and lemmatisation from **ORACC** (<http://oracc.org/saao/>), released CC0;
adapted from the State Archives of Assyria print volumes. Please cite both.
```bibtex
@dataset{ong_2024_saa_morphosyntax,
author = {Ong, Matthew},
title = {{A Full Morphosyntactic Annotation of the State Archives of Assyria Letter Corpus}},
year = {2024},
version = {1.0.0},
publisher = {Zenodo},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.10622984}
}
```
Underlying text and lemmatisation are from [ORACC](http://oracc.org/saao/), released CC0.
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