Developing Onomastic Gazetteers and Prosopographies for the Ancient World Through Named Entity Recognition and Graph Visualization: Some Examples from Trismegistos People

Abstract

Abstract.Developing prosopographies or onomastic lists in a non-digital environment used to be a painstaking and time-consuming exercise, involving manual labour by teams of researchers, often taking decades. For some scholarly disciplines from the ancient world this is still true, especially those studying non-alphabetical writing systems that lack a uniform transcription system, e.g. Demotic. But for many others, such as Greek and Latin, digital full text corpora in Unicode are now available, often even freely accessible. In this paper we illustrate, on the basis of Trismegistos, how data collection through Named Entity Recognition and visualization through Social Network Analysis have huge potential to speed up the creation of onomastic lists and the development of prosopographies.

Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods

“…The site's first excavator, Otto Rubensohn, also found a Greek grave inscription in stone as well as a writing board inscribed in Greek46. Taken together with the multitude of Greek papyri that were written at the site, this evidence strongly suggests that at least some inhabitants of Abusir el-Meleq were literate in, and able to speak, Greek45. However, a general issue concerning the site is that several details of the context of the individuals analysed in this study were lost over time.…”

“…Importantly, there is evidence for foreign influence at Abusir el-Meleq. Individuals with Greek, Latin and Hebrew names are known to have lived at the site and several coffins found at the cemetery used Greek portrait image and adapted Greek statue types to suit ‘Egyptian' burial practices245. The site's first excavator, Otto Rubensohn, also found a Greek grave inscription in stone as well as a writing board inscribed in Greek46.…”

Crossing Experiences in Digital Epigraphy

“…20 Apart from NER, TM has embraced some other important technical innovations from 2012 onwards. As TM Networks (founded by Yanne Broux) illustrates, we have experimented with what is traditionally called Social Network Analysis [SNA] but now increasingly just network analysis (Broux & Depauw, 2015a). 21 This method of studying connectedness can be used not only to study relations between people, but also places, names or even Demotic epistolary formulae (Broux, 2016;Dogaer & Depauw, 2017).…”

“…We have, for instance, revisited the old discussion of the rise of Christianity in the fourth century AD on the basis of the use of Christian names (Depauw & Clarysse, 2013;Depauw & Clarysse, 2015); the increasing use of mother's names in identification clusters (Broux & Depauw, 2015b); the practice of naming your child after a Hellenistic queen (Clarysse & Broux, 2016); or the rise in popularity of double names and hybrid names in the Roman period (Broux, 2015;Dogaer, 2015a;Dogaer, 2015b;Dogaer & Depauw, 2017). In other publications networks, also a form of quantification, are used to study co-occurrence of place names or combinations of epistolary formulae (Broux & Depauw, 2015a). Much more is possible, and I hope that others will start using the data in TM for their own quantitative research.…”

Mapping the Demotic Epistolary Framework through Network Visualisation

“…33 About half of the letters mention a regnal year, but no ruler is included in the date. 34Broux and Depauw (2015) also argue for a date around the middle of the fourth century for a considerable portion of the Elephantine letters, using another network approach.Brought to you by | KU Leuven University Library Authenticated | nico.dogaer@kuleuven.be author's copy Download Date | 1/29/18 12:13 PM…”