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

说明与用途

创建了一个公开的 CSV 数据集，将创世记人物寿命与苏美尔王表的统治年限对齐，保留文本变体和来源出处，并提供可复现的分析脚本。

问题

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.

结果

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

工作流

• 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.

证据

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

来源

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

来源

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

来源

Output: total_lifespan_MT 609.0 total_lifespan_LXX 640.4 total_lifespan_SP 577.0

来源