ADART (Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia)

ADART — Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia — is the four-volume standard printed edition of the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries, cuneiform tablets recording nightly sky observations from Babylon across roughly 626 BCE to AD 75. Edited by A.J. Sachs and H. Hunger, the volumes were published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press between 1988 and 2022. An open digital edition derived from it, Astronomical Diaries Digital (ADsD, via ORACC, CC0, Pirngruber/Rinderer/Harris 2022), has also been produced.

Matters to this vault as the ground-truth benchmark that an automated, language-model-assisted dating pipeline measures itself against — the pipeline's candidate-year rankings are scored by whether they reproduce ADART's tablet-by-tablet published dates, and the pipeline's own undated-tablet work (ADART IV) picks up where the printed edition's editors left dates unresolved.

• 2026-10-28: A second, independently-developed project (Aaron Schein and Chris Wolfram, University of Chicago, with Brown's John Steele) is also using LLMs plus a Bayesian model to extract and verify the Diaries' astronomical observations — including, as a secondary goal, potentially dating ADART IV's still-undated entries — but predates the Pinheiro/Ting pipeline and has not engaged with its findings; parallel work, not corroboration (claim-uchicago-schein-wolfram-havi-project-parallel-not-corroborating-pinheiro-ting-babylonian-diaries).

References

• claim-babylonian-diaries-automated-dating-96-percent-top-rank-inclusion
• claim-babylonian-diaries-dating-pipeline-parser-llm-mcp-astronomy
• claim-babylonian-diaries-dating-system-conservative-commitment-rule
• claim-uchicago-schein-wolfram-havi-project-parallel-not-corroborating-pinheiro-ting-babylonian-diaries