Big Archaeological Data: Mining social information about ancient Mesopotamian civilizations using a graph database built from cuneiform corpora

Thousands of cuneiform tablets have been excavated that contain administrative texts with proper names, job positions, business transactions, names of institutions, etc. Building on preliminary evidence of feasibility achieved by third authors, we present an approach based on a graph database to extract additional information about communities and individuals of Ancient Mesopotamia. This paper explains how we are creating a semantically-enhanced graph, in which individuals appear as nodes and the interactions between them are expressed as connecting labeled arrows, with vocabularies specifically designed to enable deep analysis.