sol-r/keilschrift-corpus

Keilschrift: Ancient Near Eastern Cuneiform Corpus

A unified multilingual corpus of ancient Near Eastern cuneiform texts for machine learning, covering Sumerian, Akkadian, Old Persian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Urartian, and Aramaic — spanning 3400 BCE to 63 BCE.

"Keilschrift" is German for "cuneiform" (literally "wedge-writing").

Statistics

	count
corpus passages	214,049
parallel pairs	170,199
languages	8
time span	3400 BCE – 63 BCE

Corpus by language

ISO 639-3	language	family	count	period
sux	Sumerian	isolate	182,621	3400 BCE – 100 CE
akk	Akkadian	Semitic (East)	21,929	2500 BCE – 100 CE
peo	Old Persian	IE (Iranian)	8,045	525 – 330 BCE
elx	Elamite	isolate	1,436	2600 – 360 BCE
xhu	Hurrian	Hurro-Urartian	12	2300 – 1200 BCE
hit	Hittite	IE (Anatolian)	2	1600 – 1178 BCE
xur	Urartian	Hurro-Urartian	2	860 – 590 BCE
arc	Aramaic	Semitic (NW)	2	1100 BCE – present

Corpus by source

source	passages
CDLI	131,316
SumTablets	82,339
ETCSL	394

Pairs by type

direction	type	count
sux → sux	cuneiform unicode → transliteration	82,339
sux → sux	sign names → transliteration	82,339
sux → eng	transliteration → translation	4,455
akk → eng	transliteration → translation	961
elx → eng	transliteration → translation	72
peo → eng	transliteration → translation	29
hit → eng	transliteration → translation	2
xur → eng	transliteration → translation	2

Sources and citations

SumTablets

82,339 Sumerian cuneiform tablets with three-way alignment: Unicode cuneiform glyphs, sign name sequences, and scholarly transliterations. Derived from ORACC transliterations mapped to Unicode representations.

• Citation: Simmons, C. (2024). "SumTablets: A Transliteration Dataset of Sumerian Tablets." Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Machine Learning for Ancient Languages (ML4AL 2024), ACL Anthology. doi:10.18653/v1/2024.ml4al-1.20
• License: CC BY 4.0
• URL: https://huggingface.co/datasets/colesimmons/SumTablets

ETCSL (Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature)

394 Sumerian literary compositions with transliterations and 380 English prose translations. Includes hymns, myths, epics (Gilgamesh, Enmerkar), laments, proverbs, debates, and royal hymns.

• Citation: Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Fluckiger-Hawker, E., Robson, E., and Zólyomi, G. (1998–2006). The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. Oxford: Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.
• License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
• URL: https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/
• Archive: Oxford Text Archive, handle 20.500.12024/2518

CDLI (Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative)

131,316 cuneiform texts with ATF transliterations drawn from a catalogue of 353,000+ artifacts. Covers Sumerian, Akkadian, Old Persian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Urartian, and Aramaic. 12,559 texts include English translations.

• Citation: Englund, R.K. et al. Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. University of California, Los Angeles / Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
• License: CC BY 4.0
• URL: https://cdli.earth/
• Data: https://github.com/cdli-gh/data

ORACC (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus)

Not yet included in this release. ORACC provides curated, lemmatized cuneiform texts with scholarly translations from 140+ projects covering Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, and other languages.

• Citation: Tinney, S. et al. Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
• License: CC BY-SA 3.0
• URL: https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/

Schema

Corpus (monolingual passages):

field	type	description
id	string	unique identifier ({source}_{original_id})
text	string	text content (transliteration)
text_type	string	transliteration
language	string	ISO 639-3 code
source	string	etcsl, cdli, sumtablets
period	string	historical period (e.g. "Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)")
genre	string	text genre (e.g. "literary", "administrative")
cdli_id	string	CDLI P-number if available
work	string	composition name for literary texts
word_count	int	word/token count

Pairs (parallel texts):

field	type	description
id	string	unique identifier
source	string	data source
language_a	string	source language ISO 639-3
language_b	string	target language ISO 639-3
text_a	string	source text
text_b	string	target text
text_type_a	string	cuneiform_unicode, sign_names, or transliteration
text_type_b	string	transliteration or translation
period	string	historical period
genre	string	text genre
cdli_id	string	CDLI P-number
work	string	composition name

Related projects

• CuneiML — cuneiform dataset with tablet photographs and Unicode transcriptions (Liang et al., 2023). doi:10.5334/johd.151
• CompVis cuneiform-sign-detection — image-based cuneiform sign detection dataset

Acknowledgments

This dataset builds on decades of work by assyriologists, sumerologists, and digital humanities scholars who created CDLI, ORACC, and ETCSL. Special thanks to Cole Simmons and the SumTablets project for making cuneiform Unicode mappings available in ML-ready format.