Cuneiform archive formation and taphonomy
A cuneiform archive is almost never a library someone meant to keep: clerks pulped settled receipts back into clay, households weeded their tablets on implicit retention schedules, and most excavated groups belonged to institutions that were already dead when their rooms were sealed. What survives is therefore a double filter — the recycling queue frozen at the moment of abandonment, then the accidents of excavation and publication. Reading the record means modelling both filters: which document classes were destroyed on schedule, which archives died young enough to fossilize their daily paperwork, and why excavated tablet groups range from a dozen tablets in a jar to tens of thousands in a palace wing.
Emergent lineage
Related pages, connected by this project's own research.
Related Pages
Other pages that share linked material with this one.
Cuneiform archives (CDLI)
CDLI/BDTNS -- Ur III and Old Babylonian archives, and the Astronomical Diaries.
Record claim
About the production, transmission, survival, or filtering of the written/material record up to the pre-modern past itself -- scribal behaviour and e…
Published editions
critical and documentary print editions used as countable data (Meersseman, Glorieux, MGH, Kaeppeli, Schwartz's Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, and o…
Instrument claim
About modern catalogues, collections, digitization, excavation sampling, scholarly practice, or this corpus itself.
Not yet built
none -- no adequate existing dataset; the kill test requires new collection or fieldwork.
Archaeological survey
excavation and survey datasets, LiDAR, settlement hierarchies, architectural/acoustic measurement.
Rank-size laws and heavy tails
Zipf's law in linguistics, Pareto in economics, and Gibrat's proportionate-growth model all say the same structural thing: many social and productive…
Survival analysis: hazard rates and half-lives
Actuarial survival analysis and firm-mortality studies model how long things last: the hazard rate of dying at each age, the lifetime distribution, t…
Open conjectures — noetic, untested
Falsifiable questions posed below the evidence boundary by the 1001 Conjectures project. They are leads, not evidence, and carry no weight in this page's assessment.
- Tablet N of a series of M Anticipated in print · untested
- The pharaoh answered in ink we lost Already answered
- The trough the empire fell into Already answered
- The receipts weigh more than the library Already answered
- The named years with nothing dated in them Anticipated in print · untested
- The findspot the market erased Anticipated in print · untested
From the One Thousand and One Conjectures. They carry no evidential weight here; verdicts and credits live on each conjecture's own page.