Models and vocabularies for ancient Near Eastern prosopographies

Rossana Damiano, Stefano De Martino (Dipartimento di Studi Storici) and Elena Devecchi (Dipartimento di Studi Storici) will present the findings of an interesting investigation performed in the PRIN project “Writing uses: Transmission of Knowledge, Administrative Practices and Political Control in Anatolian and Syro-Anatolian Polities in the II and I millennium BC”.

Title: Models and vocabularies for ancient Near Eastern prosopographies

Prosopographies, intended as the large scale study of the people’s life events as they emerge from written sources, have been largely used in the last decade to study the social structure of ancient societies. The analysis of professional, kinship, administrative and political relations of the past, informed on real data, can confirm the models put forth by historians and archaeologists through traditional research paradigms, and in some cases suggest new ones. In this sense, the availability of agreed-upon, formally expressed vocabularies for describing these data and the relations to sources is a key factor to the development of methods for the analysis of social networks from the past in support of the work of historians.

The PRIN project “Writing uses: Transmission of Knowledge, Administrative Practices and Political Control in Anatolian and Syro-Anatolian Polities in the II and I millennium BC.” (2020-2022) has investigated the adaptation of a factoid-based model of prosopographic data to the case study of Hittite and Kassite civilizations. Aimed at the collaborative creation of prosopographic datasets for large-scale study of Hittite and Kassite social networks, the project has collected a corpus of person records and relations in a Linked Data format. In this seminar, she will describe the design of the vocabularies for the construction of the datasets and the research methods being developed from these data.