BALT: Babylonian Administrative and Legal Texts on Oracc

This repository contains a copy of the data published as the project "BALT: Babylonian Administrative and Legal Texts" on the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc). The project contains 2,990 Babylonian administrative and legal texts from the Neo-Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic periods (c. 626–93 BCE). Stemming from the Eanna and Ebabbar temple archives in Uruk and Sippar and from private archives in Sippar, Babylon, Borsippa, Nippur, and Uruk, these texts give a picture of the administration and daily economic activities at ancient Babylonian cult centers and private households.

These texts have been transliterated by a number of scholars specializing in first millennium cuneiform sources. The great majority of the texts were transliterated by the late János Everling, a Hungarian scholar who pioneered the practice of making cuneiform transliterations available online. His translations cover the texts published in AnOr 8, CT 49, GCCI 1–2, Nbk, TuM 2/3, UCP 9/1, UCP 9/3, UCP 9/12, VS 3, and YOS 17. Yuval Levavi and Caroline Waerzeggers provided transliterations and translations for the texts published in Administrative Epistolography in the Formative Phase of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (dubsar 3, 2018) and Marduk-rēmanni: Local Networks and Imperial Politics in Achaemenid Babylonia (OLA 233, 2014).

Within the context of Oracc, the BALT project is special in that the lemmatizations, part of speech tags, normalizations, and sense tags were not done manually but rather semi-automatically, i.e. with the help of trainable language models. These models are largely but not completely accurate, hence certain words in the BALT corpus are not lemmatized or may have their lemma, normalization, POS tag, or sense wrong. According to our evaluation, about 93% of lemmas, 96% of POS tags, and 70% of normalizations are correct.

Scripts.zip contains scripts used for converting CoNLL-U files to Oracc ATF. 

The BALT project was based at the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires, hosted at the University of Helsinki and funded by the Research Council of Finland (decision nos. 312051, 336673, and 352747).

We thank Yuval Levavi and Caroline Waerzeggers for their permission to use their work in BALT. János Everling's legacy data is published to honor his pioneering work in making transliterated cuneiform texts available online.

This semi-automatically lemmatized online edition of the texts has been created by Tero Alstola, Aleksi Sahala, Jonathan Valk, and Matthew Ong. Linda Leinonen, Matias Sakko, Senja Salmi, and Repekka Uotila assisted in cleaning the data and creating metadata.

We wish to thank Kathleen Abraham, Michael Jursa, and Shai Gordin for giving us access to NaBuCCo metadata for certain texts. We also thank Niek Veldhuis and Heidi Jauhiainen for their help at various stages of the project. We are grateful to the Oracc steering committee and other developers of Oracc for providing us with the digital platform to publish this annotated text corpus. 

For further information on the dataset, see Alstola, T., Sahala, A., Valk, J., & Ong, M. (2026). Semi-Automatic Annotation of Babylonian Cuneiform Texts. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 12(41). https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.494.