The organization and use of documentary deposits in the near east from ancient to medieval times : libraries, archives, book collections and genizas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A multidisciplinary approach is utilized to assess the organization and use of ancient and medieval Near Eastern textual deposits. An elaborate survey of the published material in ancient Near Eastern studies and library and archival studies indicates a general and pervasive insensitivity to and misuse of key terminological constructs. The indistinct portrayal of the nature of ancient libraries and archives is identified as of particular concern; as well as a widespread disregard for the recognition of textual collections older than the famed Library of Alexandria. This dissertation endeavours to indicate the presence of distinct textual collective units in the ancient Near Eastern context on equal footing with their much later counterparts and more broadly defined than the traditional library and archive, to include entities such as the geniza, building and foundation deposits, and so forth. Furthermore, the ancient temple library, as a restricted and well-regulated collective entity, is suggested as representative of literary standardization in the Near East, and the canonization process of the Hebrew Bible, in particular. Ancient archives are attested as equally prevalent textual units, clearly distinguishable from adjunct textual deposits, often loosely, but incorrectly, termed "archives" in modern scholarly discourse. In conclusion, this dissertation reconsiders the status of the two traditionally most valued ancient textual entities, the Library of Assurbanipal and the Library of Alexandria, and concludes that these entities are atypical examples of ancient textual collections. As closest claimants to the improbable and often religiously imbued ideal of universal collection of information, these libraries erroneously became the impossible standards by which all ancient collections were measured and found wanting. As alternate, the applicability of the theoretical constructs proposed in the earlier part of this dissertation, such as the introduction of an in
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".