  We present work in jointly inferring the unique individuals as well as their
social rank within a collection of letters from an Old Assyrian trade colony in
K\"ultepe, Turkey, settled by merchants from the ancient city of Assur for
approximately 200 years between 1950-1750 BCE, the height of the Middle Bronze
Age. Using a probabilistic latent-variable model, we leverage pairwise social
differences between names in cuneiform tablets to infer a single underlying
social order that best explains the data we observe. Evaluating our output with
published judgments by domain experts suggests that our method may be used for
building informed hypotheses that are driven by data, and that may offer
promising avenues for directed research by Assyriologists.
