Three degrees of separation: networks in the city of Babylon during the Reign of Darius I (522–486 BCE)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this paper, I reconstruct the networks of Babylonian urban dwellers during the reign of Darius I (522–486 BCE) based on 803 tablets from 10 private archives in Babylon. The main aim is to examine the structure and connectivity of the network that connected different urban families and groups of individuals outside the families. I focus on the positions individuals occupied within the network that yielded them the power to connect smaller parts of the network. The first approach used to identify and analyze these positions is the betweenness centrality measure. The second approach is the analytic concept of brokerage, the role of mediating between two or more individuals or communities that would otherwise have no connection to each other. I identify differences in the ways that the intermediate position of brokers affected the formation of the network. These brokerage roles resulted from families’ strategies to increase their household wealth by constructing and optimizing marriage, prebendary, and business relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".