---
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.