In Search of Lost Time - Estimating Dates of Broken Cuneiform Documents

This paper tackles a simple but crucial question: can we estimate the dates of ancient texts when their original dates are missing? Historians have long relied on prosopography, the method of dating a text by checking whether the people it names appear in other, securely dated documents. The challenge is that this process quickly becomes unmanageable and inconsistent when applied across thousands of records. Our contribution is to bring computational tools and, in particular, network analysis, to bear on this traditional approach, allowing dates to be estimated systematically, quickly, at scale, and with full transparency and reproducibility.