Data‑Wrangling Ancient Texts: Building an Open Dataset of Genesis Lifespans and Sumerian Reigns

Описание и применение

Создан открытый CSV‑датасет, объединяющий продолжительность жизни патриархов из Библии и продолжительность правления царей из Сумерского списка царей, с учётом текстовых вариаций и источников.

Задача

Create a machine‑readable table that aligns lifespans from Genesis and reign lengths from the Sumerian King List while preserving textual variants and source provenance.

Результат

A publicly available, citation‑rich dataset that aligns lifespans and reigns, highlights textual differences, and provides reproducible analysis scripts.

Рабочий процесс

• 1. Define scope and groups of rows.
• 2. Decide on a wide table schema to match spreadsheet use.
• 3. Map textual variants for Genesis (MT, LXX, SP) and Sumerian reigns from ETCSL.
• 4. Fetch and parse source texts, leaving blanks for missing data.
• 5. Handle ETCSL ASCII transliteration (replace ‘c’ with ‘š’, keep raw form in notes).
• 6. Store data in UTF‑8 CSV with provenance columns.
• 7. Load CSV with pandas to verify and compute statistics.
• 8. Plot log‑scale bar chart for visual comparison.
• 9. Publish dataset and code, documenting limitations and sources.

Доказательства

The CSV has four groups of rows: 19 Genesis patriarchs, 1 LXX‑only row, 8 antediluvian kings, 10 early postdiluvian kings

Источник

We decided not to [force] the two traditions into one "years" column. A patriarch's lifespan and a king's reign are different quantities

Источник

Our first scrape took these strings literally. That gave us a table where Gilgamesh was named "Gilgamec", which looks like a typo

Источник

Output: total_lifespan_MT 609.0 total_lifespan_LXX 640.4 total_lifespan_SP 577.0

Источник