Books by Tero Alstola
In Judeans in Babylonia, Tero Alstola presents a comprehensive investigation of deportees in the ... more In Judeans in Babylonia, Tero Alstola presents a comprehensive investigation of deportees in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. By using cuneiform documents as his sources, he offers the first book-length social historical study of the Babylonian Exile, commonly regarded as a pivotal period in the development of Judaism. The results are considered in the light of the wider Babylonian society and contrasted against a comparison group of Neirabian deportees. Studying texts from the cities and countryside and tracking developments over time, Alstola shows that there was notable diversity in the Judeans’ socio-economic status and integration into Babylonian society.
Tero Alstola (2020). Judeans in Babylonia: A Study of Deportees in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BCE. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 109. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004365421.
Articles by Tero Alstola
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2024
Digital Humanities has an increasing need for widely applicable and easy-to-use methods across di... more Digital Humanities has an increasing need for widely applicable and easy-to-use methods across disciplinary boundaries. We believe that the cross-disciplinary methods we have developed for the study of the ancient Near East are useful for the study of other research questions outside the field of “Digital Assyriology”. The article presents an overview of automated language processing for lexical-semantic analysis, social network analysis, and content analysis. We draw on the work in our research group, which aims to address how changing empires affect social group identities and lifeways in the first millennium BCE in Mesopotamia. The article places the methods our research team has developed into the larger methodological context of Digital Humanities (DH). The article presents an overview of the tools our research group has found useful in our study of ancient social groups. Sections 1 and 2 give the necessary background for the reader to understand the particular challenges related to the study of ancient Mesopotamia and how we have overcome them. The concrete case studies presented in Sections 3 and 4, however, are kept as general as possible, to facilitate similar approaches in adjacent fields of study. Our methodology and approaches are well documented and openly available, and in our view can be used on similar text materials, by other groups interested in DH approaches.
Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions: Methodological Encounters and Debates, 2024
For a full pdf, please send me an email ([email protected]).
Alstola, Tero, and Saana Svär... more For a full pdf, please send me an email ([email protected]).
Alstola, Tero, and Saana Svärd. 2024. "Digital Humanities Meet Ancient Languages." Pages 193–233 in Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions: Methodological Encounters and Debates, edited by Martti Nissinen and Jutta Jokiranta. Resources for Biblical Study 106. Atlanta: SBL.
Pp. 139-171 in Bigot Juloux, Di Ludovico, and Matskevich (eds.), The Ancient World Goes Digital, DBS 6, Leiden: Brill. The full article can be downloaded at http://hdl.handle.net/10138/563599., 2023
This article uses a language-technological tool called fastText to analyze the semantic contexts ... more This article uses a language-technological tool called fastText to analyze the semantic contexts in which the names of certain Mesopotamian gods and goddesses appear. The first part of our contribution explains our methods and tools and is more technical. The second part, which discusses our results and their relevance to the study of Mesopotamian religion, is more accessible to the readers not familiar with digital humanities research. We show that fastText can be successfully applied to a relatively small dataset of ancient texts, and that its results are not only congruent with but can also add to the insights gained using traditional methods.
Studia Orientalia Electronica 11(2), pp. 5-29, 2023
The aim of this article is to discuss several groups of sources which are of special interest reg... more The aim of this article is to discuss several groups of sources which are of special interest regarding the question of Mesopotamian identities after 539 BCE, towards the end of the use of cuneiform writing. In this late period, several languages and scripts were in use in Mesopotamia; therefore, groups of Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek, and Sumerian texts are discussed. The scripts used are Aramaic letters, cuneiform, and the Greek alphabet. A scholar who is interested in late Mesopotamian identities needs to take all these documents into account. This article aims at giving a brief overview on available textual material and where to find it. The topics of these texts vary from administrative documents to highly literary texts. The authors discuss Aramaic inscriptions, legal and administrative cuneiform texts, the astronomical diaries, the Seleucid Uruk scholarly texts, the late Babylonian priestly literature, Emesal cult-songs from the Hellenistic period, the Graeco-Babyloniaca (clay tablets containing cuneiform and Greek), and finally Greek inscriptions from Mesopotamia.
Tomaž Erjavec and Maria Eskevich (eds.), Selected papers from the CLARIN Annual Conference 2022, Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 198, pp. 111–119, 2023
We present BabyLemmatizer, a hybrid lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian, the language of the a... more We present BabyLemmatizer, a hybrid lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian, the language of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, documented from 2350 BCE to 100 CE. In our approach the text is first POS-tagged and lemmatized with TurkuNLP trained with human-verified labels, and then post-corrected with dictionary-based methods to improve the lemmatization quality. The post-correction also assigns labels with confidence scores to flag the most suspicious lemmatizations for manual validation. We demonstrate that the presented tool achieves a Lemma+POS labeling accuracy of 94%, and a lemmatization accuracy of 95% in a held-out test set. We also apply the lemmatizer to a previously unlemmatized text corpus to test it in practice.
CLARIN Annual Conference Proceedings, 2022, Prague, Czechia, 2022
We present a hybrid lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian, the language of the ancient Assyrians... more We present a hybrid lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian, the language of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, documented from 2350 BCE to 100 CE. In our approach the text is first POS-tagged and lemmatized with TurkuNLP trained with human-verified labels, and then post-corrected with dictionary-based methods to improve the lemmatization quality. The postcorrection also assigns labels with confidence scores to flag the most suspicious lemmatizations for manual validation. We demonstrate that the presented tool achieves a Lemma+POS labeling accuracy of 94%, and a lemmatization accuracy of 95% in a held-out test set.
Aleksi Sahala, Tero Alstola, Jonathan Valk, and Krister Lindén. 2022. “BabyLemmatizer: A Lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian.” Pages 14–18 in CLARIN Annual Conference Proceedings, 2022, Prague, Czechia. Edited by Tomaž Erjavec and Maria Eskevich. https://office.clarin.eu/v/CE-2022-2118-CLARIN2022_ConferenceProceedings.pdf.
The Routledge Handbook of Emotions in the Ancient Near East, 2022
This chapter discusses the use of digital tools – in particular, language technology – to study t... more This chapter discusses the use of digital tools – in particular, language technology – to study the history of emotions. There are a growing number of annotated text corpora for ancient languages large enough to benefit from computational analysis. This chapter focuses on the cuneiform Akkadian texts available in the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc) and applies two language-technological methods, pointwise mutual information (PMI) and the fastText implementation of the continuous skip-gram model, to a dataset of 7,346 texts. To illustrate the potential of these methods, they are used to analyze the semantic domains of the verb râmu, “to love,” and its derivatives in Akkadian. Because the usage and semantic domains of a word can vary greatly between different genres, the dataset is divided into several genres, and the analysis focuses on royal inscriptions, letters, and literary text genres. The results show that, like the word love in English, râmu can denote different aspects of affection and love. It refers, for example, to erotic and sexual relationships between people, affection between family members, the king’s love of justice, and the gods’ pleasure with and acceptance of the king who fulfills divine expectations.
Tero Alstola, Heidi Jauhiainen, Saana Svärd, Aleksi Sahala, and Krister Lindén. 2022. “Digital Approaches to Analyzing and Translating Emotion: What Is Love?” Pages 88–116 in The Routledge Handbook of Emotions in the Ancient Near East. Edited by Karen Sonik and Ulrike Steinert. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822873-6.
Journal of Open Humanities Data 8:8, 2022
The dataset is a social network of over 17,000 individuals who lived during the so-called Neo-Ass... more The dataset is a social network of over 17,000 individuals who lived during the so-called Neo-Assyrian period of Mesopotamian history, primarily in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. The undirected network of individuals connected by co-occurrences in cuneiform documents was semi-automatically extracted from the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. In addition to two weighted versions of the one-mode co-occurrence network, the dataset also contains a two-mode person-text network and rich metadata for each individual. For the first time, the dataset allows largescale computational analysis of social structures in the Assyrian Empire. The data is primarily stored as plain text and CSV files, inviting scholars to further expand and enrich it. The scripts and files used for creating and standardizing the data are also available in the Zenodo repository.
Heidi Jauhiainen and Tero Alstola. 2022. “A Social Network of the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.” Journal of Open Humanities Data 8 (8): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.74.
The Expression of Emotions in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, 2021
The article applies a number of language technological methods to the study of fear words in Akka... more The article applies a number of language technological methods to the study of fear words in Akkadian texts.
Svärd, S., Alstola, T., Jauhiainen, H., Sahala, A. & Linden, K., 2021, "Fear in Akkadian Texts: New Digital Perspectives on Lexical Semantics" in The Expression of Emotions in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia edited by Hsu, S-W. & Llop-Raduà, J., Leiden: Brill, pp. 470-502 (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 116), https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004430761.
Journal of Cuneiform Studies 71, 2019
Large digital datasets of cuneiform sources lend themselves to computational analysis that can co... more Large digital datasets of cuneiform sources lend themselves to computational analysis that can complement and improve upon traditional philological work. The present article applies social network analysis to an electronic corpus of 1,532 texts to study the god Aššur and his position in divine networks in the Neo-Assyrian period. Our results show that the performance of social network analysis can be improved by using a small window size and calculating tie strengths with pointwise mutual information. This allows us to study the co-occurrences of gods in semantic contexts. From a network perspective, Aššur is not a very central god in our corpus despite his importance in Assyrian royal theology, but he rather joins the existing networks of gods without altering them.
Available at https://doi.org/10.1086/703859 and https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/publications/a%C5%A1%C5%A1ur-and-his-friends-a-statistical-analysis-of-neo-assyrian-text.
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, 2019
This article introduces a corpus of cuneiform texts from which the dataset for the use of the Cun... more This article introduces a corpus of cuneiform texts from which the dataset for the use of the Cuneiform Language Identification (CLI) 2019 shared task was derived as well as some preliminary language identification experiments conducted using that corpus. We also describe the CLI dataset and how it was derived from the corpus. In addition, we provide some baseline language identification results using the CLI dataset. To the best of our knowledge, the experiments detailed here represent the first time that automatic language identification methods have been used on cuneiform data.
Available at https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W19-1409.
Die Welt des Orients, 2017
Published in Die Welt des Orients 47 (2017), pp. 25-51 (https://doi.org/10.13109/wdor.2017.47.1.2... more Published in Die Welt des Orients 47 (2017), pp. 25-51 (https://doi.org/10.13109/wdor.2017.47.1.25).
This article focuses on Judean merchants in Babylonia, their social networks, and their business activities in the sixth century BCE. I argue that these people were integrated into the commercial sphere of Babylonian society and that they had native Babylonian merchants as well as traders of foreign origin among their acquaintances. Judeans participated in Babylonian long-distance trade, and documented evidence shows that some of them travelled as far as Iran for the purpose of trading. Furthermore, because travelling and the transportation of goods are an integral part of commercial activity, merchants provide an example of people who could have maintained connections between Judeans living in Judah and Babylonia.
Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, 2016
Published in Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 111, pp. 326-329 (2016). Available at http://dx.do... more Published in Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 111, pp. 326-329 (2016). Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/olzg-2016-0128.
Datasets by Tero Alstola
Zenodo
These datasets supplement my book Judeans in Babylonia: A Study of Deportees in the Sixth and Fif... more These datasets supplement my book Judeans in Babylonia: A Study of Deportees in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BCE (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 109. Leiden: Brill 2020). They are openly available at Zenodo and are intended to serve further research on the topic.
Publications in Finnish by Tero Alstola
Published in Tekstejä babylonialais- ja persialaisajan Lähi-idästä. Töyräänvuori, J. & Valkama, K... more Published in Tekstejä babylonialais- ja persialaisajan Lähi-idästä. Töyräänvuori, J. & Valkama, K. (toim.). Helsinki: Suomen eksegeettinen seura, s. 29-32. (Suomen eksegeettisen seuran julkaisuja; nro 119).
Published in Tekstejä babylonialais- ja persialaisajan Lähi-idästä. Töyräänvuori, J. & Valkama, K... more Published in Tekstejä babylonialais- ja persialaisajan Lähi-idästä. Töyräänvuori, J. & Valkama, K. (toim.). Helsinki: Suomen eksegeettinen seura, s. 83-99. (Suomen eksegeettisen seuran julkaisuja; nro 119).
Published in Tekstejä babylonialais- ja persialaisajan Lähi-idästä. Töyräänvuori, J. & Valkama, K... more Published in Tekstejä babylonialais- ja persialaisajan Lähi-idästä. Töyräänvuori, J. & Valkama, K. (toim.). Helsinki: Suomen eksegeettinen seura, s. 33-38. (Suomen eksegeettisen seuran julkaisuja; nro 119).
Published in Tekstejä babylonialais- ja persialaisajan Lähi-idästä. Töyräänvuori, J. & Valkama, K... more Published in Tekstejä babylonialais- ja persialaisajan Lähi-idästä. Töyräänvuori, J. & Valkama, K. (toim.). Helsinki: Suomen eksegeettinen seura, s. 39-43. (Suomen eksegeettisen seuran julkaisuja; nro 119).
Published in Tekstejä babylonialais- ja persialaisajan Lähi-idästä. Töyräänvuori, J. & Valkama, K... more Published in Tekstejä babylonialais- ja persialaisajan Lähi-idästä. Töyräänvuori, J. & Valkama, K. (toim.). Helsinki: Suomen eksegeettinen seura, s. 107-121. (Suomen eksegeettisen seuran julkaisuja; nro 119).
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Books by Tero Alstola
Tero Alstola (2020). Judeans in Babylonia: A Study of Deportees in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BCE. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 109. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004365421.
Articles by Tero Alstola
Alstola, Tero, and Saana Svärd. 2024. "Digital Humanities Meet Ancient Languages." Pages 193–233 in Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions: Methodological Encounters and Debates, edited by Martti Nissinen and Jutta Jokiranta. Resources for Biblical Study 106. Atlanta: SBL.
Aleksi Sahala, Tero Alstola, Jonathan Valk, and Krister Lindén. 2022. “BabyLemmatizer: A Lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian.” Pages 14–18 in CLARIN Annual Conference Proceedings, 2022, Prague, Czechia. Edited by Tomaž Erjavec and Maria Eskevich. https://office.clarin.eu/v/CE-2022-2118-CLARIN2022_ConferenceProceedings.pdf.
Tero Alstola, Heidi Jauhiainen, Saana Svärd, Aleksi Sahala, and Krister Lindén. 2022. “Digital Approaches to Analyzing and Translating Emotion: What Is Love?” Pages 88–116 in The Routledge Handbook of Emotions in the Ancient Near East. Edited by Karen Sonik and Ulrike Steinert. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822873-6.
Heidi Jauhiainen and Tero Alstola. 2022. “A Social Network of the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.” Journal of Open Humanities Data 8 (8): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.74.
Svärd, S., Alstola, T., Jauhiainen, H., Sahala, A. & Linden, K., 2021, "Fear in Akkadian Texts: New Digital Perspectives on Lexical Semantics" in The Expression of Emotions in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia edited by Hsu, S-W. & Llop-Raduà, J., Leiden: Brill, pp. 470-502 (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 116), https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004430761.
Available at https://doi.org/10.1086/703859 and https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/publications/a%C5%A1%C5%A1ur-and-his-friends-a-statistical-analysis-of-neo-assyrian-text.
Available at https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W19-1409.
This article focuses on Judean merchants in Babylonia, their social networks, and their business activities in the sixth century BCE. I argue that these people were integrated into the commercial sphere of Babylonian society and that they had native Babylonian merchants as well as traders of foreign origin among their acquaintances. Judeans participated in Babylonian long-distance trade, and documented evidence shows that some of them travelled as far as Iran for the purpose of trading. Furthermore, because travelling and the transportation of goods are an integral part of commercial activity, merchants provide an example of people who could have maintained connections between Judeans living in Judah and Babylonia.
Datasets by Tero Alstola
Publications in Finnish by Tero Alstola
Tero Alstola (2020). Judeans in Babylonia: A Study of Deportees in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BCE. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 109. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004365421.
Alstola, Tero, and Saana Svärd. 2024. "Digital Humanities Meet Ancient Languages." Pages 193–233 in Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions: Methodological Encounters and Debates, edited by Martti Nissinen and Jutta Jokiranta. Resources for Biblical Study 106. Atlanta: SBL.
Aleksi Sahala, Tero Alstola, Jonathan Valk, and Krister Lindén. 2022. “BabyLemmatizer: A Lemmatizer and POS-tagger for Akkadian.” Pages 14–18 in CLARIN Annual Conference Proceedings, 2022, Prague, Czechia. Edited by Tomaž Erjavec and Maria Eskevich. https://office.clarin.eu/v/CE-2022-2118-CLARIN2022_ConferenceProceedings.pdf.
Tero Alstola, Heidi Jauhiainen, Saana Svärd, Aleksi Sahala, and Krister Lindén. 2022. “Digital Approaches to Analyzing and Translating Emotion: What Is Love?” Pages 88–116 in The Routledge Handbook of Emotions in the Ancient Near East. Edited by Karen Sonik and Ulrike Steinert. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822873-6.
Heidi Jauhiainen and Tero Alstola. 2022. “A Social Network of the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.” Journal of Open Humanities Data 8 (8): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.74.
Svärd, S., Alstola, T., Jauhiainen, H., Sahala, A. & Linden, K., 2021, "Fear in Akkadian Texts: New Digital Perspectives on Lexical Semantics" in The Expression of Emotions in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia edited by Hsu, S-W. & Llop-Raduà, J., Leiden: Brill, pp. 470-502 (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 116), https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004430761.
Available at https://doi.org/10.1086/703859 and https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/publications/a%C5%A1%C5%A1ur-and-his-friends-a-statistical-analysis-of-neo-assyrian-text.
Available at https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W19-1409.
This article focuses on Judean merchants in Babylonia, their social networks, and their business activities in the sixth century BCE. I argue that these people were integrated into the commercial sphere of Babylonian society and that they had native Babylonian merchants as well as traders of foreign origin among their acquaintances. Judeans participated in Babylonian long-distance trade, and documented evidence shows that some of them travelled as far as Iran for the purpose of trading. Furthermore, because travelling and the transportation of goods are an integral part of commercial activity, merchants provide an example of people who could have maintained connections between Judeans living in Judah and Babylonia.
Pyhät tekstit eivät ole ajan hampaalta ja inhimillisiltä erheiltä suojattuja sen paremmin kuin maallisetkaan hengentuotteet, vaikka Raamattuun ja vanhoihin traditioihin usein liitetään ajatus juuri muuttumattomuudesta.
Tekstit ja perinteet elävät jatkuvasti, toisinaan myös tietoisen valinnan seurauksena: esimerkiksi Paavali siteeraa Vanhan testamentin tekstejä omaan retoriikkaansa sopivasti, ei välttämättä sanatarkasti. Tekstien muutoksiin ovat vaikuttaneet myös kulttuuriset ja yhteiskunnalliset muutokset, esimerkiksi väestönsiirrot, kaupunkien tuhoutumiset sekä erilaisten kulttuuriperinteiden kohtaamiset ja sulautumiset.
Kiveen hakattu? raottaa pyhien tekstien historiaa ja teksteihin tehtyjä perusteltuja ja dokumentoituja muutoksia vieden samalla pohjaa fundamentalismilta. Esimerkiksi Raamatun muuttumattomuus on illuusio: vanhat käsikirjoitukset ovat aina olleet erilaisia sekä kokoonpanoltaan että sisällöltään. Muinaiset tekstit ovat suodattuneet meidän aikaamme lukuisten kirjureiden ja kääntäjien kätten kautta.
https://www.teologia.fi/ajankohtaista/1380-muinainen-maahanmuutto-vaikutti-myoes-juutalaisuuden-syntyyn