The classification axis: what kind of document is this?
14 September 2026 · Nabu news
A gravestone inscription is sepulcralis in one collection, epitaph in another, funerary in a third, Inscription funéraire in a fourth, and a Leichenpredigt — a printed funeral sermon — in a fifth. Until this week, “show me all funerary texts across the library” required knowing every collection’s private jargon. Now it is one query:
nabu search "dis manibus" --kind funerary --lang la
The library’s fourth document axis — kind, beside dates, places, and lects — folds each source’s own genre vocabulary onto a ruled cross-corpus class list: 21 plain families (funerary, dedicatory, administrative, legal, letter, lexical, scripture, divination, poetry, historiography, …), each carrying pointers to the international vocabularies that recognize it (the EAGLE epigraphic types, Library of Congress genre/form terms, Getty AAT). No external standard spans cuneiform tablets, papyri, stone, scripture, and novels at once — the survey behind this axis verified that — so the list is the library’s own, and every upstream label is preserved verbatim beside the fold.
Classification is multi-label. An ode to a ruler is poetry AND
royal; a cuneiform “Administrative Letter” is both of its words; a
verse epitaph carries funerary/epitaph and poetry together. And
it is two-grain: --kind divination finds the whole family,
--kind divination/extispicy narrows to the liver omens.
The numbers, from the live census
(19 September 2026): 1,953,835 documents classified —
85% of the library — drawn
from upstream catalogue genres (cuneiform’s CDLI and Oracc, the
Heidelberg and Rome epigraphic databases), the papyri’s HGV text
types (Quittung, Vertrag, Mumienetikett), the sibu 四部
classes of the Chinese canon, Japan’s NDC decimal codes, Sefaria’s
category tree, and whole-collection declarations where a source IS
one thing — the Korean dynastic records, the Buddhist and biblical
canons. What no rule covers yet sits in an honest, counted
unmapped bucket; sources carrying nothing genre-shaped say so
through their postures. The full board lives on the new
Kinds page, and nabu kind census
prints it in under a second.