About the Project

Shaping History at Scale

This project applies computational methods to the systematic study of cuneiform tablet shape across 3,300 years of writing history. It is part of the broader DigitalPasts research program at Ariel University and the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences Hub at the Open University of Israel.

What is computational diplomatics?

Diplomatics is the scholarly discipline of studying the external, physical features of documents — their format, material, layout, and formulaic structure — as evidence for the historical context of their production. Founded by Jean Mabillon in the 17th century for the authentication of medieval charters, it was applied to cuneiform scholarship by scholars including Charpin, Cancik-Kirschbaum, Hackl, and Jursa.

Computational diplomatics extends this tradition through machine learning and computer vision: instead of a single expert examining hundreds of tablets, we apply systematic, reproducible algorithms to tens of thousands. The implicit knowledge of the trained diplomat becomes explicit, scalable, and verifiable.

The key finding

The most consistent result across all measurement approaches is a three-millennium shift from portrait to landscape tablet orientation, from median h/w ≈ 1.1–1.3 in the 3rd and early 2nd millennium BCE to h/w ≈ 0.75–0.85 in the Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Hellenistic periods. This shift is:

  • Present across all geographic zones
  • Confirmed at the individual site level (Larsa, Nippur, Uruk, Kalhu, Sippar, …)
  • Not a sampling artifact (variance decomposition confirms within-site change dominates)
  • Captured independently by three measurement methods

Team

  • Shai Gordin — PI, Assyriology and computational history, Ariel University & Open University of Israel
  • Danielle Kapon Epshtain — Machine learning and data science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
  • Michael Fire — Computational methodology supervision, Ben-Gurion University

DigitalPasts Lab

DigitalPasts is a research group dedicated to the application of digital and computational methods to ancient Near Eastern studies.