Layers, and the literary family
18 September 2026 Β· Nabu news
Four days after the classification axis went live, its class list got
its first structural lesson. The cuneiform catalogs label thousands of
tablets simply Literary β literature, no further claim β and the
original 26-head list had homes for poetry, narrative, drama, essay,
diary and wisdom, but none for their parent. Now it does, the natural
way: literary is a family, the six literature classes live
inside it (literary/poetry, literary/narrative/epic, β¦), and a
document upstream calls just βLiteraryβ honestly carries the bare
family head. Any prefix matches its whole family in queries β
--kind literary finds all of it,
--kind literary/narrative narrows, and the same deepening works for
every class. The live board:
21 class families, every one
attested, 1,953,835 documents
classified (85% of the
kind-eligible library, as of 19 September 2026).
The same pass drained the curation worklist. A full audit of every unmapped upstream label folded roughly a hundred more values β Hittite catalog ranges resolved against the corpusβs own sub-corpus tags, the papyriβs German documentary tail, stray prayers, curse tablets and writing exercises that already had homes β and introduced an honest new category: values declared not-genre (a physical-layout tag, a bare copy marker), reviewed and folded to nothing, with the reason on record. The worklist now opens by saying what it is and what to do with a line, and what remains in it is a quarter of what was there before, all of it genuinely undecided.
And the site learned the lesson a reader taught it: the three axis pages β dates, places, kinds β told one story in three places. They are now one Layers page: the shared doctrine first (every layer extracted, never guessed; honesty buckets counted, never hidden; everything derived and rebuildable), then when, where and what kind as sections that compose into one query:
nabu search lugal --place cigs:GIR --from -2200 --to -2000 --kind administrative
Old links redirect; nothing is lost but the repetition.