pyaegean 0.5.0

A specialist Python toolkit for Ancient Greek — alphabetic Greek and the Aegean syllabic scripts (Linear A/B).

pyaegean

A specialist Python toolkit for Ancient Greek — alphabetic Greek and the Aegean syllabic scripts (Linear A, Linear B, Cypriot, and Cypro-Minoan). pyaegean focuses narrowly and deeply on Greek and the Aegean world: a script-agnostic corpus data layer, the analytical methods from the Linear A Research Workbench, translation, and a pluggable multi-provider AI layer. The excellent CLTK already serves many ancient languages broadly; pyaegean is intentionally narrower, and uses CLTK as a friendly benchmark to measure its Greek coverage against.

Status: v0.5.0 (alpha). The script-agnostic core, Linear A, Linear B (Mycenaean Greek), the Cypriot syllabary (Arcado-Cypriot Greek), and the undeciphered Cypro-Minoan script (sign inventory only) — the complete Aegean syllabic set — plus the full Greek NLP track (opt-in Perseus-treebank lemmas/POS, a generalizing tagger and lemmatizer, a neural lemmatizer for unseen forms, LSJ glossing, a baseline dependency parser, a CLTK benchmark harness, and a neutral out-of-AGDT PROIEL evaluator), and the multi-provider AI layer are all implemented. Analytical output on the undeciphered Linear A material is exploratory — see the methodology and limitations.

Install

pip install pyaegean              # core + Linear A + Greek (zero heavy dependencies)
pip install "pyaegean[neural]"    # + the neural Greek lemmatizer (onnxruntime; no torch)
pip install "pyaegean[ai]"        # + Anthropic / OpenAI / Grok / Gemini clients
pip install "pyaegean[all]"       # the data, AI, EpiDoc, and geo extras

New to Python, or not a programmer? You're exactly who this tool is for. The Getting Started guide walks you from "I have nothing installed" to your first result — no prior coding assumed.

Quick start

Prefer to learn by doing? Run the guided tour in your browser — nothing to install:

import aegean

corpus = aegean.load("lineara")          # 1,721 inscriptions, bundled, offline
print(len(corpus))                       # 1721

ht = corpus.filter(site="Haghia Triada") # filter by metadata (full site name)
df = corpus.to_dataframe(level="word")   # pandas-native, one row per word

from aegean.analysis import balance_check, word_matches_sign_pattern
checks = balance_check(corpus.get("HT13"))          # KU-RO accounting reconciliation
hits = [w for w, _ in corpus.word_frequencies()
        if word_matches_sign_pattern(w, "KU-*-RO")] # wildcard sign search

And a taste of the Greek pipeline:

from aegean import greek

greek.betacode_to_unicode("mh=nin")     # 'μῆνιν'   (type Greek in plain ASCII)
greek.syllabify("ἄνθρωπος")             # ['ἄν', 'θρω', 'πος']
greek.scan_hexameter("ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ").pattern
# '—⏑⏑|—⏑⏑|—⏑⏑|—⏑⏑|—⏑⏑|—×'             (Odyssey 1.1)
[str(a) for a in greek.analyze("λόγον")][:2]
# ['λόγος [NOUN acc sg masc]', 'λόγος [NOUN acc sg fem]']

The full Linear A facsimile mirror (3,368 images, ~116 MB) is not bundled; fetch it on demand: aegean.data.fetch("lineara-images") (downloaded from the workbench repo, sha256-verified, cached locally — never re-hosted). The opt-in Greek backends likewise fetch large CC BY-SA assets to cache on first use (never bundled): the Perseus AGDT treebank (~75 MB, greek.use_treebank()) and the full Perseus LSJ (~270 MB, greek.use_lsj()).

What's here

• aegean.core — script-agnostic model: Corpus, Document, Token, Sign, SignInventory, Numeral, the Script plugin registry, provenance.
• aegean.scripts.lineara — Linear A: bundled corpus + 84-sign inventory + sign→sound map + transliteration.
• aegean.scripts.linearb — Linear B (Mycenaean Greek): 211-sign Unicode inventory + transliteration + a Greek-reading bridge (po-me → ποιμήν) + accounting; bring-your-own corpus.
• aegean.scripts.cypriot — Cypriot syllabary (Arcado-Cypriot Greek): 55-sign Unicode inventory + transliteration + a Greek-reading bridge (pa-si-le-u-se → βασιλεύς).
• aegean.scripts.cyprominoan — Cypro-Minoan (undeciphered Bronze Age Cyprus): 99-sign Unicode inventory + sign-sequence tokenization. No phonetics or Greek bridge — the script is undeciphered.
• aegean.analysis — ported from the workbench: accounting reconciliation, wildcard sign-pattern search, weighted phonetic distance + alignment, morphology clustering, collocation statistics, a compound-query engine, and heuristic tablet-structure classification (all with golden-fixture parity).
• aegean.greek — the Greek NLP track: Unicode/Beta Code normalization, word/sentence tokenization, syllabification, accent and prosody analysis, metrical scansion (dactylic hexameter + elegiac pentameter), reconstructed IPA, POS tagging, a rule-based morphological analyzer (with an optional Perseus-treebank–backed lexicon for attested, accented lemmas), and lemmatization from a rule-based baseline up to an opt-in neural lemmatizer (use_neural_lemmatizer; a GreTa seq2seq that reaches 76.3% on unseen forms), with a pure-Python edit-tree generalizer (use_lemmatizer) as the zero-dependency option. Also an opt-in generalizing POS tagger (use_tagger; ~84% on unseen forms), LSJ glossing (use_lsj → gloss/lookup), a baseline dependency parser (use_parser → parse; ~0.67 UAS / 0.57 LAS on projective AGDT), and a CLTK benchmark harness. aegean.load("greek") loads a small bundled sample corpus (Archaic→Koine).
• aegean.data — bundled-data access + download-to-cache for large assets.
• aegean.ai — multi-provider AI layer: a provider-agnostic LLMClient (Anthropic default, plus OpenAI, xAI Grok, Gemini — SDKs optional), response caching, corpus grounding, and capabilities (translate, gloss, decipherment hypotheses, NLP-assist, ask/summarize). Every generative result is labeled exploratory with provenance. aegean.translate is the hybrid lexicon+LLM front end.

Documentation

Full documentation lives in the project wiki:

• Getting Started — for newcomers to Python
• Example notebook — a runnable guided tour (open in Colab)
• Tutorial — two guided, end-to-end research walkthroughs
• Linear A · Analysis · Greek NLP · AI Layer — reference per domain
• Data & Provenance · FAQ

Roadmap

Shipped (through v0.3): the script-agnostic core and Linear A; the multi-provider AI layer and translation; and the deep Greek NLP track — Perseus-treebank lemmas/POS, a generalizing tagger and lemmatizer, the neural lemmatizer, LSJ glossing, a baseline dependency parser, and a CLTK benchmark harness. v0.4 adds Linear B (Mycenaean Greek: a Unicode-built sign inventory, transliteration, a Greek-reading bridge, and accounting; the full corpus is bring-your-own) and the Cypriot syllabary (Arcado-Cypriot Greek). v0.5 adds Cypro-Minoan (the undeciphered Bronze Age script of Cyprus; sign inventory only), completing the Aegean set, and a neutral out-of-AGDT evaluator (greek.evaluate_on_proiel, scoring against the PROIEL treebank) backing the Greek-NLP numbers. Next: the data-layer/IO work toward a stable v1.0.

License

Apache-2.0. Corpus data is GORILA (Godart & Olivier 1976–1985) via mwenge/lineara.xyz; facsimile imagery © École Française d'Athènes (referenced, not redistributed). The opt-in Greek backends fetch the Perseus AGDT treebank (CC BY-SA 3.0) and Perseus LSJ (CC BY-SA 4.0) to cache — built locally, never bundled or re-hosted. See NOTICE.