An initiative dedicated to further the standardisation of metadata entities and associated vocabularies in cuneiform studies.
View the Project on GitHub cdli-gh/glow_vocabularies
Chronology Working Group
Émilie Pagé-Perron, Jamie Novotny, Heather Baker, Bertrand Lafont, Damien Agut-Labordere, Bruno Gombert, Mirko Novak, and David Danzig
A date is a temporal entity which can be approximate or not and uncertain or not, this both based on information known from the artifact to which it is associated (though information found in the text, archaeological find context, and palaeographic and artifact typology infomation) and based on our general understanding of the time frame in which the specific date occurs.
A date starts with providing the widest chronological range and goes to the narrowest, from the period to the day. The different information composing a date will varry according to project and the corpus that is being studied as dates were recorded differently in various places and times.
Each field of this entity can be considered as a separate entity. However, for the sake of simplicity and compatibility among projects, they are treated here as parts of a single entity. Each project treats and encodes parts of a date differently in terms of format and structure but the idea remains the same and is grounded in decades of Assyriological practice. The first part of a date is the period which is discussed in a separate document. A date cannot be dissociated of it’s period, especially when some fields of the date entity are missing. See period.
When known, the actual calendar year should be given. This year number is based on numerous sources specific to the period, culture and the thourough analysis of corpora for political, astronomical and environmental clues.
The ruler field refers to the regional ruler’s name. The ruler’s name can be mentioned in the text or can be deduced from the year name or the eponym name.
Just like the ruler’s name, the regnal year can be mentioned in the text or can be deduced from the year name or the eponym name.
This field contains the month number of in the calendar.
This field contains the number of the day in the current month.
Optional fields should be used as possible when the date is uncertain. They will provide important information that helps narrowing down the date or date range associated with a text.
This field should he used especially when the ruler’s name is not available.
This field should be used when the date number is not identifyable. See the year name page.
Providing the eponym name provides information towards regnal year.
Especially in the third millennium, calendars can display variation and the calendrical position of a month in a city is not always certain.
There are generally few digital resources listing vocabularies to use in the fields of the date entity. Aside from exracting lists of entities from digital corpora of existing projects, some lists are available at cdli::wiki and at cdli.
See the very simple presentation mode adopted by cdli:wiki:
Bertrand Lafont, Émilie Pagé-Perron