Sumerian Mythology*

Unsupervised Sumerian Personal Name Recognition

This paper describes an unsupervised named-entity recognition (NER) system to identify personal names in Sumerian cuneiform documents from the Ur III period. We are motivated by the needs of social and economic historians of that period to identify specific persons of importance and such historically relevant facts as can be discerned by the surviving texts. The work was confronted by the chall...

Context and Mythology

In this thesis, I will survey some philosophically representative approaches to the problem of the relationship between context and meaning. Starting from G.W.F. Hegel’s discussion of the meaninglessness of indexical terms in the Phenomenology of Spirit, I will investigate Gottlob Frege’s notion of context and the legacy of this notion in the formal sciences of language, showing that this appro...

Greek technology or mythology?

The study by Stefanadis et al. in this issue indicates that treatment with a variety of statins reduces the release of heat from atherosclerotic plaques in the human coronary artery. This observation suggests that statins exert a beneficial effect on the inflammatory process that exists in the vascular wall in a variety of acute coronary syndromes. The finding that this effect was most pronounc...

The Philosophy of Mythology

Creating Tools for Morphological Analysis of Sumerian

Sumerian is a long-extinct language documented throughout the ancient Middle East, arguably the first language for which we have written evidence, and is a language isolate (i.e. no related languages have so far been identified). The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), based at the University of Oxford, aims to make accessible on the web over 350 literary works composed durin...