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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
 Posted - 06/26/2008 : 09:06:02
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Hey SFNers. I have a statistical question for some research I'm doing. It's a little beyond my abilities, so I thought I'd ask the people here for some help. I'll footnote anyone who can help me, of course (assuming this all amounts to something).
Let me set up the problem with a little history lesson.
In ancient Mesopotamia, there was a settlement called Puzrish-Dagan ("Protection of [the god] Dagan"), that we'll call Drehem (its modern name). We have from Drehem ca. 12,000 published cuneiform documents. They deal largely with animal expenditures from the central bureau to various destinations. That is, ancient Drehem was some sort of stockyard-- or at least was home to the stockyard's main office-- and when ordered by officials, an animal was transfered from the stockyard to, for instance, a temple (for sacrifice), or other similar places.
Here is a typical example of such a document, scanned on all sides:
OIP 121, 389
These documents aren't big, and one can fit in the palm of your hand. This one says, more or less:
"One dead 2-year-old oxen to the 'kitchen' expended from the account of (mister) Intae'a on the 8th day of the 3rd month (May-June), 5th year of the king Amar-Su'en (ca. 2045 BCE)"
So far so good? Good.
A complication in this is that Drehem wasn't ever systematically excavated. That is, back in the early 20th century, looters got to the site, dug up tablets (probably over a period of some years), and sold them to dealers in Baghdad and elsewhere. Thus (and this is important) we have no context for these documents. Were they all from the same room? Or same building? Or did they come from different buildings? Or maybe they were found in what amounts to an ancient trash heap.
Another consequence of this is that the Drehem tablets are scattered in collections all around the world. Similarly, the publication of the Drehem documents has been scattered. For (literally) almost 100 years, tablets have seen publication in anything from small, obscure journals featuring just a handful such texts, to huge tomes with copies of a thousand or more. From an essay by Prof. Tom B. Jones:| The Drehem find was ... presumably in 1909, but possibly as early as 1908. The discovery was announced in 1910 by F. Thureau-Dangin, who published thirteen new texts. In the following year, the same scholar identified the Drehem months and established their order. Then, large collections began to be published ... [from collections] all at Paris in 1911 ...[and so on]" |
Still with me? I hope so.
Let me introduce a table to try and demonstrate a little more the situation we have:
ID no. Pub Date Site
026839 AUCT 1 397 AS01 - 08 - 01 Drehem
165845 Nisaba 08 225 AS01 - 08 - 01 Drehem
048867 SAT 2 0684 AS01 - 08 - 03 Drehem
029537 AUCT 2 179 AS01 - 08 - 03 Drehem
047701 JCS 52 08 12 AS01 - 08 - 04 Drehem
021718 NYPL 059 AS01 - 08 - 05 Drehem
014445 TLB 3 099 AS01 - 08 - 07 Drehem
022115 JCS 31 244 18 AS01 - 08 - 08 Drehem
002321 TCL 2 5571 AS01 - 08 - 08 Drehem
002305 TCL 2 5555 AS01 - 08 - 10 Drehem
028344 ASJ 07 123 18 AS01 - 08 - 10 Drehem
008464 CST 233 AS01 - 08 - 11 Drehem
005489 UDT 104 AS01 - 08 - 12 Drehem
022236 MVN 08 121 AS01 - 08 - 13 Drehem
032615 Hirose 092 AS01 - 08 - 13 Drehem
002170 TAD 17 AS01 - 08 - 14 Drehem
003494 TRU 217 AS01 - 08 - 16 Drehem
008466 CST 235 AS01 - 08 - 17 Drehem
017532 MVN 01 124 AS01 - 08 - 17 Drehem
032616 Hirose 093 AS01 - 08 - 17 Drehem
002397 Trouvaille 03 AS01 - 08 - 19 Drehem
046775 OIP 121 058 AS01 - 08 - 20 Drehem
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Drehem texts from the the first part of the 8th month of the first year of the king Amar-Su'en
For our purposes, the ID number is irrelevant (just too much of a hassle to delete it). What is important is the publication in formation and the date of the text.
A glance through this suggests a rather random assemblage. The first text was published in AUCT 1 as text number 397. The series AUCT stands for Andrews University Cuneiform Texts (all abbreviations can be found here), and contains all the texts in that university's collection. Similarly, Nisaba 8 is a volume of Drehem texts in the British Museum (though, by no means all such tablets.
This is somewhat curious, because we would sort of expect there to be some order. Logically, administrative documents are most useful when arranged in some sort of order. We also have textual evidence for this. One text from Drehem reads: "Tablet basket (of the?) house (?)-- deliveries and expenditures of Ur-tur the oxherd from month 1 to month 2 of [year]" That is, this text identified the contents of a basket, namely that it contained all the records of one Ur-tur's activities for the year. We can imagine that there was some sort of order to the tablets in this basket.
Unfortunately, a conclusion one can draw from the above list is that if these texts were originally grouped together when they were found in the ground, they have since been scattered all over the planet.
While it obviously would take up way too much space to list all 12,000 Drehem texts in chronological order, my impression in looking at that list finds no discernible patterns. That is, it's safe to say that the seeming randomness shown in the table above applies throughout the corpus.
HOWEVER...
In the course of another research project on the Drehem texts documenting expenditures to the 'kitchen' I stumbled across an odd sequence. As above, using a big on-line database, I am able to call up every such text referencing the 'kitchen', and have them arranged in chronological order. This is important to my research, since I'm interested in noting certain trends over time in the nature of these expenditures.
What I noticed today was a rather curious feature of the documents dating to the 5th year of the king Amar-Su'en. Virtually all of them are housed at the University of Chicago. Not all Drehem texts, mind you, just those that deal with the expenditures to the 'kitchen' dated to this year:
ID no. Pub Date Line ref. 'kitchen'
026571 AUCT 1 128 AS05 - 01 - 17 o. 2 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047168 OIP 121 452 AS05 - 01 - 18 r. 13 cu-gid2 e2 muhaldim
047094 OIP 121 378 AS05 - 02 - 07 o. 4 cu-gid2 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047095 OIP 121 379 AS05 - 02 - 08 r. 8 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047096 OIP 121 380 AS05 - 02 - 17 o. 7 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047097 OIP 121 381 AS05 - 02 - 20 o. 6 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047093 OIP 121 377 AS05 - 02 - 02 o. 4 ba-ug7 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047098 OIP 121 382 AS05 - 02 - 25 o. 4 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047099 OIP 121 383 AS05 - 02 - 26 o. 3 cu-gid2 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047100 OIP 121 384 AS05 - 03 - 05 o. 2 ba-ug7 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047101 OIP 121 385 AS05 - 03 - 06 o. 3 cu-gid2 e2 muhaldim
047102 OIP 121 386 AS05 - 03 - 07 o. 5 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047103 OIP 121 387 AS05 - 03 - 13 o. 5 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047105 OIP 121 389 AS05 - 03 - 18 o. 2 ba-ug7 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047107 OIP 121 391 AS05 - 03 - 28 o. 3 cu-gid2 e2 muhaldim-ce3
008540 MVN 12, p. 108 AS05 - 04 - 10 o. 6 e2 muhaldim-ce3
047108 OIP 121 392 AS05 - 04 - 19 o. 4 cu-gid2 e2 muhaldim
047110 OIP 121 394 AS05 - 05 - 21 o. 3 cu-gid2 e2 muhaldim
047112 OIP 121 396 AS05 - 06 - 04 o. 2 cu-gid2 e2 muhaldim
047114 OIP 121 398 AS05 - 06 - 12 o. 5 ba-ug7 e2 muhaldim-ce3
029382 AUCT 2 024 AS05 - 07 - 09 r. 35 25 udu e2 muhaldim u4 10 la2 1-kam
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Drehem texts from the the first part of the fifth year of the king Amar-Su'en
Notice anything? Again, by selecting for just those texts recording expenditures to the 'kitchen' I found a long sequence of texts that were all (with a few exceptions) published in the series Oriental Institute Publications, from the University of Chicago.
In checking the publication of these texts, I see that they were acquired by a Chicago professor from a dealer in Baghdad in 1919-20.
My question before I pursue this further is to ask how likely this is to have happened by chance. That is, if the 'kitchen' tablets followed the general pattern noted above, we'd expect them to be scattered all over the place. And in general, that's what we see. But suddenly among this we find a bunch of texts which somehow didn't get separated.
I don't know how to get to the bottom of this, so I'll throw this out and ask for some math people is there's a way to set up something on probability to see the likelihood of these coming together by chance.
So I check here all the time, so if you need more data or something, or have an idea about how I can go about determining that this is not a random event, I'd love to talk about it!
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Edited by - Cuneiformist on 06/26/2008 09:09:25
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 10:35:39 [Permalink]
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I think it could work by comparing the odd ratio of getting one of the tablets of interest depending if they belong to the UC of if they don't.
To do so, I would need the total number of all Drehem tablets in the world (roughly 12,000, no?) and the number at the university of Chicago and the number of 'Kitchen tablets' in the world (21, I think -18 at the UC; 1 in Rome and 2 and Andrews) and the number present at the UC (18?).
From there, I should be able to get you the calculation using SAS and post it here. Should not be long. |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 10:39:54 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Simon
I think it could work by comparing the odd ratio of getting one of the tablets of interest depending if they belong to the UC of if they don't.
To do so, I would need the total number of all Drehem tablets in the world (roughly 12,000, no?) and the number at the university of Chicago and the number of 'Kitchen tablets' in the world (21, I think -18 at the UC; 1 in Rome and 2 and Andrews) and the number present at the UC (18?).
From there, I should be able to get you the calculation using SAS and post it here. Should not be long.
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OK, so there are ca. 1,000 kitchen tablets in the world. This is the problem--- in general, they don't show any sequence, either. Which is why I initially thought that the sequence I noted was just a product of random chance.
If I roll d6 a hundred times, I'm bound to come up with a few longer strings of, say, straight 5's or 6's or whatever.
I can find out how many are at any particular place, though it may take some time. |
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 10:50:07 [Permalink]
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Ok, after playing with the database, I have:
Total Drehem in the World: 11978 (busy buggers)
Total Drehem in University of Chicago: 506 according to this site. But I may have misunderstood things.
'kitchen tablets': 21 in the world.
19 in Chicago.
Unless I am wrong on one of these numbers, I'll run it like that.
Right now, the computer that has the software I want to use is occupied and I might be busy later. But, you should have your results by tomorrow at the latest. |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:06:47 [Permalink]
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Wait is that 19 out of 21 in Chicago or 19 of 40 in Chicago?
EDIT: So there are 19 or 40 out of a 1000 which are dated to that year and Chicago has most of them from that year, correct? |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
| Edited by - BigPapaSmurf on 06/26/2008 11:11:10 |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:13:52 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Simon
Ok, after playing with the database, I have:
Total Drehem in the World: 11978 (busy buggers)
Total Drehem in University of Chicago: 506 according to this site. But I may have misunderstood things.
'kitchen tablets': 21 in the world.
19 in Chicago.
Unless I am wrong on one of these numbers, I'll run it like that.
Right now, the computer that has the software I want to use is occupied and I might be busy later. But, you should have your results by tomorrow at the latest. |
Close, but not 100%. Let me try:
Total Drehem in the World: 11978 (busy buggers)
Total Drehem in University of Chicago: probably ca. 1200 (the book in question was just Drehem texts from the reign of one king; when you add up those that date to other kings, the total is a bit higher)
'kitchen tablets': Ca. 1,2000 in the world. In Chicago? Not sure. A quick glance through the two publications gives ma ca. 150. But there's one more due out, but it won't have as much material as the first two, so let's add 50 more and make it ca. 200.
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:15:32 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Cuneiformist
Originally posted by Simon
I think it could work by comparing the odd ratio of getting one of the tablets of interest depending if they belong to the UC of if they don't.
To do so, I would need the total number of all Drehem tablets in the world (roughly 12,000, no?) and the number at the university of Chicago and the number of 'Kitchen tablets' in the world (21, I think -18 at the UC; 1 in Rome and 2 and Andrews) and the number present at the UC (18?).
From there, I should be able to get you the calculation using SAS and post it here. Should not be long.
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OK, so there are ca. 1,000 kitchen tablets in the world. This is the problem--- in general, they don't show any sequence, either. Which is why I initially thought that the sequence I noted was just a product of random chance.
If I roll d6 a hundred times, I'm bound to come up with a few longer strings of, say, straight 5's or 6's or whatever.
I can find out how many are at any particular place, though it may take some time.
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The database allows you to determine how many tablets are owned by a particular institution, but I could not find the University of Chicago in the list. And I do not have the museum number.
So, I got that number through Google.
And for the Kitchen tablets; yeah, one would need the total number of them in the world as well as how many are in Chicago.
I thought the list was exhaustive and just counted. But that assumption may very well have been wrong.
But, really, once the SAS program is written, changing a few numbers is just a matter of minutes.
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:15:36 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by BigPapaSmurf
Wait is that 19 out of 21 in Chicago or 19 of 40 in Chicago?
EDIT: So there are 19 or 40 out of a 1000 which are dated to that year and Chicago has most of them from that year, correct?
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I'm sorry-- I know I'm doing a poor job of explaining things.
There are (see the post above) ca. 200 'kitchen' texts at Chicago. The ones I listed in the table above were the ones that jumped out at me as being in a sequence. The others don't fall into a sequence, though I'm now tempted to go back and see. |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:17:42 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Simon
The database allows you to determine how many tablets are owned by a particular institution, but I could not find the University of Chicago in the list. And I do not have the museum number. |
Ah-- they're under Oriental Institute. I just searched and got 1115. |
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:19:26 [Permalink]
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Just to be clear.
We are trying to see if the museum of Chicago is in possession of a disproportionate amount of the Kitchen Tablets, right?
Or did I misread the question. |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:23:28 [Permalink]
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Total Drehem in the World: 11978 (busy buggers)
Total Drehem in University of Chicago: probably ca. 1200 (the book in question was just Drehem texts from the reign of one king; when you add up those that date to other kings, the total is a bit higher)
'kitchen tablets': Ca. 1,2000 in the world. In Chicago? Not sure. A quick glance through the two publications gives ma ca. 150. But there's one more due out, but it won't have as much material as the first two, so let's add 50 more and make it ca. 200.
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How can there be more Kitchen tablets than the total Drehem?
I thought it was a sub-section of the Drehem?
What am I missing? |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:24:05 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Simon
Just to be clear.
We are trying to see if the museum of Chicago is in possession of a disproportionate amount of the Kitchen Tablets, right?
Or did I misread the question. |
Oh-- I'm doing a poor job again.
No, my question is if that sequence of texts that I listed likely.
In other words, the Drehem tablets in general seem to be scattered all over the world. And so even while we might have reason to assume that when they were initially excavated, they were found grouped in a logical order (say, by date and according to recipient or some such), those groupings were lost as looters sold batches of tablets to dealers and collectors without regard for keeping tablets that originally belonged together together.
The sequence I've found suggests (to me, anyhow) that in this one instance, these tablets were kept together and not broken up. And then we can say all sorts of things based on this.
However, given that it's a small sequence, perhaps it's just random chance that they ended up like this, and maybe they didn't originally belong together in the first place.
Does this make sense? I don't know if I'm doing a good job of explaining this. |
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:25:25 [Permalink]
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| I'd say the sequence ones are most likely from the same source, this could be tested by analysing the writing or chemical analysis of the clay I bet. I'm not sure statistics will help much without more data on origin, They could have been split up in so many inconsistant ways after they were found or UC may have a collection of tablets which were presorted prior to distribution, etc. |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:27:18 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Simon
Total Drehem in the World: 11978 (busy buggers)
Total Drehem in University of Chicago: probably ca. 1200 (the book in question was just Drehem texts from the reign of one king; when you add up those that date to other kings, the total is a bit higher)
'kitchen tablets': Ca. 1,2000 in the world. In Chicago? Not sure. A quick glance through the two publications gives ma ca. 150. But there's one more due out, but it won't have as much material as the first two, so let's add 50 more and make it ca. 200.
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How can there be more Kitchen tablets than the total Drehem?
I thought it was a sub-section of the Drehem?
What am I missing? |
Total DREHEM tablets, 12,000. Total kithcen tablets (a sub-set of Drehem tablets): 1,200
Total Chicago Drehem Tablets: 1115. Total Chicago kitchen tablets (a sub-set of their Drehem tablets): ca. 200.
Does that make sense? |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:29:13 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by BigPapaSmurf
I'd say the sequence ones are most likely from the same source, this could be tested by analysing the writing or chemical analysis of the clay I bet. I'm not sure statistics will help much without more data on origin, They could have been split up in so many inconsistant ways after they were found or UC may have a collection of tablets which were presorted prior to distribution, etc. |
This is what I was afraid of. I don't think the paleography will work, since the same scribe may have been writing lots up, and then they were stored in different places. And since they all came from essentially the same place, the chemical analysis wouldn't work either.
But yes, it does look significant, but there may not be enough data to show that they had to have been found together, rather than just ending up there by chance. |
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 11:49:02 [Permalink]
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Well considering that UC has about 10% of the total and 20% of the Kitchen Tabs, Id say a significant portion of the UC KTs are from the same source, whether pre-excavation or post-excavation is hard to say.
What I would do is put them into "possibly from the same scribe" groups, then break those groups down further, this may offer some enlightenment on the origins. Also there may be some which have different construction techniques/peculiar shapes which might point to a different maker source.
Good luck anyway.
Edit: You may also look at non-writing indicators, like right/left handedness, hand or finger impressions and whatnot. |
| Edited by - BigPapaSmurf on 06/26/2008 11:54:35 |
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Statistics help
