Ancient text corpora are the entire collection of texts from the period of ancient history, defined in this article as the period from the beginning of writing up to 300 AD. These corpora are important for the study of literature, history, linguistics, and other fields, and are a fundamental component of the world's cultural heritage.
Chinese, Latin, and Greek are examples of ancient languages with significant text corpora, although much of these corpora are known to us via transmission (frequently via medieval manuscript copies) rather than in their original form. These texts – both transmitted and original – provide valuable insights into the history and culture of different regions of the world, and have been studied for centuries by scholars and researchers. Other ancient texts – particularly stone inscriptions and papyrus scrolls – have been published following archaeological research, notably the cuneiform corpus of c.10 million words and the c.5 million words in ancient Egyptian.
Through advances in technology and digitization, ancient text corpora are more accessible than ever before. Tools such as the Perseus Digital Library and the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit [1] have made it easier for researchers to access and analyze these texts.
Two types of ancient texts are known to modern scholars – those that have only survived in younger manuscripts, but whose great age is undisputed (this applies to the bulk of the Chinese, Brahmi, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Avestan tradition), and those known from original inscriptions, papyri and other manuscripts. [2]
Counting of the words in each corpus presents significant methodological challenges – in principle, every single occurrence of a word in the text is counted separately, but in the case of parallel transmission of literary texts, only a single transmission is taken into account. Just as the Book of the Dead and the coffin texts are only included once in the number given for the Egyptian, the Greek and Latin literary works should only be counted according to one manuscript. If, on the other hand, tombs, royal inscriptions or economic documents of certain ancient languages often show a more or less identical form, this is not evaluated as a purely "parallel tradition". Attached prepositions are counted as separate words, except in the case of the definite article in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek since it has no equivalent in most languages, so its frequency would significantly affect the comparability of numbers. [2]
Script | Language | Dates used | Number of texts prior to 300AD | Number of Words prior to 300AD | Ref. | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Archaeological | Transmission | Total | |||||
Egyptian hieroglyphs / Hieratic | Egyptian | 5,000,000 | none | 5,000,000 | [3] [4] | ||
Demotic | 1,000,000 | none | 1,000,000 | [5] | |||
Greek (Ancient Greek literature, New Testament, Church Fathers, etc.) | 57,000,000 | [6] [7] | |||||
Latin | 10,000,000 | [8] [7] | |||||
Cuneiform | Akkadian | 144,000 [9] | 9,900,000 [9] | none | 9,900,000 | [10] | |
Sumerian | 102,300 [11] | 3,076,000 [11] | none | 3,076,000 | [12] | ||
Hurrian | 12,500 | none | 12,500 | [13] | |||
Urartian | 400 | 10,000 | none | 10,000 | |||
Hittite | 700,000 | none | 700,000 | [14] | |||
Hattic | 500 | none | 500 | [15] | |||
Cuneiform Luwian | 3000 | none | 3000 | [16] | |||
Elamite | 2,087 | 100,000 | none | 100,000 | [17] | ||
Protoelamic | 1,435 | 20,000 | none | 20,000 | [18] | ||
Eblaite | 16,000 | 300,000 | none | 300,000 | [19] | ||
Amorite | 7,000 | 11,600 | none | 11,600 | [20] | ||
Ugaritic | 40,000 | none | 40,000 | [21] | |||
Old Persian | 7,000 | 100,000 | 107,000 | [22] | |||
Canaanite and Aramaic | Ancient Hebrew (inc. Hebrew Bible) | 35,000 | 265,000 | 300,000 | [23] [24] | ||
Aramaic (ancient, imperial, biblical, Hasmonean, Nabataean, Palmyrenean) | 100,000 | [25] | |||||
Phoenician/Punic | 10,000 | 68 [26] | [27] [28] [29] | ||||
Old South Arabian | 10,500 | 112,500 | none | 112,500 | [30] [31] | ||
Etruscan | 25,000 | 25,000 | [32] [33] |
There are a significant number of ancient micro-corpus languages. Estimating the total number of attested ancient languages may be as difficult as estimating their corpus size. For example, Greek and Latin sources hand down an enormous amount of foreign-language glosses, the seriousness of which is not always certain. [59]
Historic preservation and maintaining ancient text corpora presents several challenges, including issues with preservation, translation, and digitization. Many ancient texts have been lost over time, and those that survive may be damaged or fragmented. Translating ancient languages and scripts requires specialized expertise, and digitizing texts can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
The field of corpus linguistics studies language as expressed in text corpora. This includes the analysis of word frequency, collocations, grammar, and semantics. Ancient text corpora provide a valuable resource for corpus linguistics research, enabling scholars to explore the evolution of language and culture over time.
Akkadian is an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia from the third millennium BC until its gradual replacement in common use by Old Aramaic among Assyrians and Babylonians from the 8th century BC.
The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization.
The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia, part of present-day Turkey. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language.
Lydian is an extinct Indo-European Anatolian language spoken in the region of Lydia, in western Anatolia. The language is attested in graffiti and in coin legends from the late 8th century or the early 7th century to the 3rd century BCE, but well-preserved inscriptions of significant length are so far limited to the 5th century and the 4th century BCE, during the period of Persian domination. Thus, Lydian texts are effectively contemporaneous with those in Lycian.
The Lycian language was the language of the ancient Lycians who occupied the Anatolian region known during the Iron Age as Lycia. Most texts date back to the fifth and fourth century BC. Two languages are known as Lycian: regular Lycian or Lycian A, and Lycian B or Milyan. Lycian became extinct around the beginning of the first century BC, replaced by the Ancient Greek language during the Hellenization of Anatolia. Lycian had its own alphabet, which was closely related to the Greek alphabet but included at least one character borrowed from Carian as well as characters proper to the language. The words were often separated by two points.
Luwian, sometimes known as Luvian or Luish, is an ancient language, or group of languages, within the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The ethnonym Luwian comes from Luwiya – the name of the region in which the Luwians lived. Luwiya is attested, for example, in the Hittite laws.
Bedřich Hrozný, also known as Friedrich Hrozny, was a Czech orientalist and linguist. He contributed to the decipherment of the ancient Hittite language, identified it as an Indo-European language, and laid the groundwork for the development of Hittitology.
Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions which form their signs. Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia.
Hittite, also known as Nesite, is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken by the Hittites, a people of Bronze Age Anatolia who created an empire centred on Hattusa, as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. The language, now long extinct, is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BC, with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from as early as the 20th century BC, making it the earliest attested use of the Indo-European languages.
Old Persian is one of two directly attested Old Iranian languages and is the ancestor of Middle Persian. Like other Old Iranian languages, it was known to its native speakers as ariya (Iranian). Old Persian is close to both Avestan and the language of the Rig Veda, the oldest form of the Sanskrit language. All three languages are highly inflected.
Hattusa, also Hattuşa or Ḫattuša or Hattusas or Hattusha, was the capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age during two distinct periods. Its ruins lie near modern Boğazkale, Turkey, within the great loop of the Kızılırmak River.
Assyriology, also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, is the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic study of the cultures that used cuneiform writing. The field covers Pre Dynastic Mesopotamia, Sumer, the early Sumero-Akkadian city-states, the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, the Akkadian and Imperial Aramaic speaking states of Assyria, Babylonia and the Sealand Dynasty, the migrant foreign dynasties of southern Mesopotamia, including the Gutians, Amorites, Kassites, Arameans, Suteans and Chaldeans. Assyriology can be included to cover Neolithic pre-Dynastic cultures dating to as far back as 8000 BC through to the Islamic Conquest of the 7th century AD so the topic is significantly wider than that implied by the root "Assyria”.
Palmyrene Aramaic was a primarily Western Aramaic dialect, exhibiting Eastern Aramaic grammatical features and hence often regarded as a dialect continuum between the Eastern and Western Aramaic branches. It was primarily documented in Palmyra itself, but also found in the western parts of the Roman Empire, extending as far as Britannia. Dated inscriptions range from 44 BCE to 274 CE, with over 4,000 known inscriptions, mostly comprising honorific, dedicatory, and funerary texts. The dialect still retains echoes of earlier Imperial Aramaic. The lexicon bears influences from both Koine Greek and, to some extent, Arabic.
The Canaanite languages, sometimes referred to as Canaanite dialects, are one of three subgroups of the Northwest Semitic languages, the others being Aramaic and Amorite. These closely related languages originate in the Levant and Mesopotamia, and were spoken by the ancient Semitic-speaking peoples of an area encompassing what is today Israel, Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, as well as some areas of southwestern Turkey (Anatolia), western and southern Iraq (Mesopotamia) and the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia.
The Sidetic language is a member of the extinct Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family known from legends of coins dating to the period of approximately the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE found in Side at the Pamphylian coast, and two Greek–Sidetic bilingual inscriptions from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE respectively. The Greek historian Arrian in his Anabasis Alexandri mentions the existence of a peculiar indigenous language in the city of Side. Sidetic was probably closely related to Lydian, Carian and Lycian.
Hieroglyphic Luwian (luwili) is a variant of the Luwian language, recorded in official and royal seals and a small number of monumental inscriptions. It is written in a hieroglyphic script known as Anatolian hieroglyphs.
Old Persian cuneiform is a semi-alphabetic cuneiform script that was the primary script for Old Persian. Texts written in this cuneiform have been found in Iran, Armenia, Romania (Gherla), Turkey, and along the Suez Canal. They were mostly inscriptions from the time period of Darius I, such as the DNa inscription, as well as his son, Xerxes I. Later kings down to Artaxerxes III used more recent forms of the language classified as "pre-Middle Persian".
In epigraphy, a multilingual inscription is an inscription that includes the same text in two or more languages. A bilingual is an inscription that includes the same text in two languages. Multilingual inscriptions are important for the decipherment of ancient writing systems, and for the study of ancient languages with small or repetitive corpora.
The Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, also known as Northwest Semitic inscriptions, are the primary extra-Biblical source for understanding of the society and history of the ancient Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arameans. Semitic inscriptions may occur on stone slabs, pottery ostraca, ornaments, and range from simple names to full texts. The older inscriptions form a Canaanite–Aramaic dialect continuum, exemplified by writings which scholars have struggled to fit into either category, such as the Stele of Zakkur and the Deir Alla Inscription.
Kubaba was a goddess of uncertain origin worshiped in ancient Syria. Despite the similarity of her name to these of legendary queen Kubaba of Kish and Phrygian Cybele, she is considered a distinct figure from them both. Her character is poorly known. Multiple local traditions associating her with other deities existed, and they cannot necessarily be harmonized with each other. She is first documented in texts from Kanesh and Alalakh, though her main cult center was Carchemish. She was among the deities worshiped in northern Syria who were incorporated into Hurrian religion, and in Hurrian context she occurs in some of the Ugaritic texts. She was also incorporated into Hittite religion through Hurrian intermediaties. In the first millennium BCE she was worshiped by Luwians, Arameans and Lydians, and references to her can be found in a number of Greek texts.
All those frequency counts are drawn from a much wider variety of subjects and styles than exist for classical or medieval Latin, and because the volume of printed and spoken matter in any modern language is staggeringly huge, their authors take great pains to select "representative" corpora, seeking statistically meaningful data. Things are quite different in Latin, where there is, for the classical period, a surviving mass of literature estimated at no more than 9,000,000 words, whereas the corpus of classical Greek literature is usually estimated at "only" ten times that much.'
[Table: Biblical: BHS 305500; Non-biblica: Ben Sire 7020, Qumran 38349, Inscr 2528; Total 353396] The foregoing statistics of the size of the various corpora of Hebrew texts have been derived in the following way. From the totals in the table, Words Beginning with Aleph in Order of Frequency, it can be seen that we have identified 61,883 occurrences of words in the Hebrew Bible (Biblia hebraica stuttgartensia) beginning with Aleph. Knowing that there are some 305,500 words in the Hebrew Bible (the figure comes from Francis I. Andersen and A. Dean Forbes, The Vocabulary of the Old Testament [Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1989], p. 23), we can assume that, roughly speaking, the 1,422 occurrences of Aleph words in ben Sira imply a text of c. 7,020 words (i.e. 1422, divided by 61833 and multiplied by 305500). Similarly, the total of 7,768 occurrences in the Qumran and related materials implies a corpus of c. 38,300 words (in the non-biblical texts already published, that is).
Most estimates place it at around ten thousand texts. Texts that are either formulaic or extremely short constitute the vast majority of the evidence.
Mais les données principales sont fournies par plus de 8000 inscriptions monumentales , au texte soigneusement gravé dans la pierre ou coulé dans le bronze
The early Buddhist canon written in Pali comprises some 4 million words of text written across several centuries in early India. As such, it is of interest not only to scholars of Buddhism but also linguists and historians for the insight it gives into the social, linguistic, and religious culture of the time.