Abstract: Cuneiform Technical Recipes as Semantic Network
By Eduardo Escobar, University of California, Berkeley
American Oriental Society Meeting 2017
Friday March 17th afternoon - ANE II, Bunker Hill Room
Omni Hotel, California Plaza, 251 South Olive Street, Los Angeles
Assyrian technical recipe texts that provide step-by-step instructions for making colored glasses that imitate precious stones (7th century BCE) and processing perfumed oils (13th century BCE) preserve a challenging technical lexicon of ingredients and technological processes. Cuneiform technical recipes frequently employ rare nouns, qualifiers, and common verbs employed in uncommon ways. Early Akkadian dictionaries used etymology and modern chemical equivalencies to decipher these terms, as in, for example, R. Thompson's (1936) Dictionary of Assyrian Chemistry. This study proposes new methods for understanding difficult technical terms using social network analysis tools for calculating metrics (principally, Cytoscape and Gephi), and producing visualizations. These visual maps, which I call “semantic ingredient networks,” plot unknown ingredients within their full semantic contexts. I argue that we can use semantic ingredient networks to development new research questions, and to narrow in on the semantic range of technical terms, even when an exact translation cannot be achieved. Moreover, I propose that semantic networks can also function as pedagogical tools, providing students with a visual resource for understanding words in context, as well as supplement traditional philological text commentaries and dictionaries.