Nabu

A personal, local, license-honest library of the ancient world — that your AI tools can read.

Project site: arvicco.github.io/nabu — the library, tools, and sources presented in full, without the README compression.

Nabu pulls the world's openly licensed digital corpora of antiquity — Homer and the Greek canon, the Latin classics, documentary papyri from Egypt, the Sanskrit epics, cuneiform tablets, the Bible in fifteen parallel witnesses, Beowulf — into one library on your own disk. Everything is plain files plus SQLite: searchable by word or by dictionary lemma, citable to the exact verse or tablet line, honest about every text's license, and rebuildable from scratch at any time. And because it ships a read-only MCP server, the AI assistants you already use can search, quote, and cite the whole library — while structurally unable to change a letter of it.

Named for the Mesopotamian god of scribes, patron of the tablet house and divine custodian of Ashurbanipal's library. It is not a website and not a reader app: it is a pipeline plus a database, operated from the command line, designed to outlive the services it draws from.

As of 2026-10-13 the shelves hold 2,374,951 documents / 112,521,554 passages in 207 language codes — from proto-cuneiform tablets of the late 4th millennium BCE to Meiji-era Japanese. The summer waves built the core: EEBO-TCP Phase I brought the early-modern English print library whole (24.1M passages — the corpus's second language) under the maintainer's written grant, the Old Mandarin desk arrived as a connected series of rhyme books (the Guangyun, Wang Renxu's Qieyun, the 'Phags-pa 蒙古字韻, the 中原音韻 of 1324), and the historical slice of the Open Korean Historical Corpus more than doubled the document count in a day (1,198,779 documents from the Samguk sagi of 1145 through the Ilseongnok court diaries, each record carrying its own license). The autumn arc then opened whole regions: the Southeast Asia desk (the DHARMA epigraphic corpora with the first digital Old Mon text anywhere, the kakawin library, Bagan's Old Burmese — then 1,252 Balinese palm-leaf lontars transcribed manuscript-direct, Jawi-script Malay manuscripts, the Thai Collected Chronicles), the Central Asia corridor (Khotanese, Sogdian, Bactrian, Chagatai, the Secret History of the Mongols), the Slavic shelves end to end (nine Wikisource cones, the 1488 Prague Bible, the Ipatiev chronicle), a first American wing (colonial Zapotec testaments, Guaman Poma's chronicle), and South Asia in force: the DHARMA Tamil-country and Deccan epigraphy, Siddham's Gupta pillars, the printed South Indian Inscriptions volumes, Project Madurai's classical Tamil e-texts at 1.2M lines, the Gurmukhī scriptural canon at line grain — and TAMILEX, whose per-word gold wordsplit layer (262,093 rows) exists nowhere else for Old Tamil. Behind TITUS's members-only gate, personal grants opened the Middle Iranian books and the whole Tocharian corpus — all 4,250 West Tocharian documents of the Berlin, London and Paris collections, plus two leaves Maue's handlist identifies as Tumshuqese. OpenITI's Classical Arabic remains the largest language at 33.3 million passages, ahead of early-modern English (24.3M) and Literary Chinese (19.0M). Plus 2,761,739 dictionary entries across 566 dictionary shelves and 22.8 million gold lemma annotations in 48 languages (a further 31.0 million ride an honestly labelled silver tier). (All numbers in this README are read from the live catalog, never estimated.)

Quickstart

git clone https://github.com/arvicco/nabu && cd nabu
bundle install                 # Ruby 3.3+; deliberately small dependency set
bin/nabu quickstart            # the starter shelf: 4 sources, ~690 MB, minutes — then:
bin/nabu align "MARK 2.3"      # one verse, seven witnesses
bin/nabu search --lemma λέγω   # dictionary-form search: λέγουσι, εἶπας, εἰπεῖν…
bin/nabu define λόγος          # the whole LSJ entry, citations resolved

A fresh checkout works with zero configuration. The long form — prerequisites, honest sizes and timings, growing the library, MCP registration — is the site's Quickstart page (kept in-repo as docs/quickstart.md).

Run the demo

No clone, no sync: the public ghcr.io/arvicco/nabu-demo image bakes an open demo slice of the library (Greek New Testament, Hebrew Bible, Latin Vulgate, World English Bible, LSJ and Lewis & Short — sources and per-source licenses in /demo/demo-census.json inside the image) behind the read-only MCP server. The full library is a local build (Quickstart above).

docker run -i --rm ghcr.io/arvicco/nabu-demo                      # MCP over stdio
claude mcp add nabu -- docker run -i --rm ghcr.io/arvicco/nabu-demo   # Claude Code

(GitHub strips custom-scheme links, so the badges go through the editors' https redirects to vscode:mcp/install?… and cursor://anysphere.cursor-deeplink/mcp/install?….) Docker Desktop's MCP Toolkit, hosted deploy buttons (Render, Koyeb) and the HTTP mode are on the site's MCP page.

Show me

Real commands, real output, pasted from live runs on 2026-07-11/12 (trims marked with …).

One verse of Mark across the aligned witnesses — Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, Old English, and more — each with its license label (this run predates the Sahidic and Bohairic Coptic witnesses that joined 2026-07-13, making fifteen registered):

$ bin/nabu align "MARK 2.3"
MARK 2.3 — New Testament (parallel witnesses)
  13 of 13 witnesses attest this ref

greek-nt — The Greek New Testament [grc]   license: nc
  urn:nabu:proiel:greek-nt:6563
    καὶ ἔρχονται φέροντες πρὸς αὐτὸν παραλυτικὸν αἰρόμενον ὑπὸ τεσσάρων.

latin-nt — Jerome's Vulgate [lat]   license: nc
  urn:nabu:proiel:latin-nt:10368
    et venerunt ferentes ad eum paralyticum qui a quattuor portabatur

gothic-nt — The Gothic Bible [got]   license: nc
  urn:nabu:proiel:gothic-nt:37435
    jah qemun at imma usliþan bairandans, hafanana fram fidworim.

marianus — Codex Marianus [chu]   license: nc
  urn:nabu:proiel:marianus:36421
    Ꙇ придѫ къ немоу носѧште ослабленъ жилами. носимъ четꙑрьми.

wscp — West-Saxon Gospels [ang]   license: nc
  urn:nabu:proiel:wscp:102359
    & hi comon anne laman to him berende, þone feower men bæron.

WEB (English) — Mark [eng]   license: open
  urn:nabu:eng-web:mrk:2.3
    Four people came, carrying a paralytic to him.

… (Armenian, SBLGNT, Clementine Vulgate, and the four CCMH OCS witnesses trimmed)

Look up the first word of Western literature — with the dictionary's citations resolved to live passages in your own catalog:

$ bin/nabu define μῆνις
μῆνις — A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott-Jones) [attribution]  urn:nabu:dict:lsj:n67485
  gloss: wrath

μῆνις, Dor. and Aeol. μᾶν-, ἡ, gen.
A. μήνιος Pl. R. 390e , later μήνιδος Ael. Fr. 80 , … —wrath; from Hom.
downwds. freq. of the wrath of the gods, Il. 5.34 , al., A. Ag. 701 (lyr.),
… but also, generally, of the wrath of Achilles, Il. 1.1 , al. …

resolved citations (in this corpus — nabu show <urn>):
  Il. 1.1 → urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2:1.1
  Il. 5.34 → urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2:5.34
  A. Ag. 701 → urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0085.tlg005.1st1K-grc1:701
  …

Search by dictionary form, not surface string — suppletion and all:

$ bin/nabu search --lemma λέγω --limit 3
urn:nabu:proiel:chron:108755 [grc]  λέγω → ῥηθέντος  (lay)
  ὅ περ ἦν καὶ αἴτιον τοῦ μὴ ἐλθεῖν τὸν γενήσαντά με εἰς τὸν Μορέαν μετὰ τοῦ αὐθεντοπούλου κὺρ Θωμᾶ εἰ…
urn:nabu:proiel:chron:121080 [grc]  λέγω → εἶπον, εἰπὲ  (lay)
  Πολλῶν οὖν λόγων δαπανηθέντων, τέλος ἐστάλησαν πρὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον δύο τῶν κελλιωτῶν καὶ συντρόφων μου…
urn:nabu:proiel:chron:121083 [grc]  λέγω → εἴπω  (lay)
  Ἐγὼ δὲ νὰ ἀκούω παρὰ μὲν τῶν, ὅτι καλή ἐστι, παρὰ δὲ τῶν, ὅτι οὐ καλή, διὰ τὶ νὰ μηδὲν εἴπω·
3 hits (exact lemma match; text is pristine)

Pull a random tablet off the cuneiform shelf:

$ bin/nabu show --random --source oracc
urn:nabu:oracc:rinap-rinap1:Q003443:1 [akk]
  a-di {KUR}sa-u₂-e KUR-e ša ina {KUR}lab-na-na-ma it-tak-ki-pu-u₂-ni
  document: urn:nabu:oracc:rinap-rinap1:Q003443 — Tiglath-pileser III 30
  source: oracc   license: open   sequence: 0   revision: 1
  provenance:
    2026-07-10 18:36:28 +0200  loaded  nabu-loader

— a royal inscription of Tiglath-pileser III, "as far as Mount Saue, which abuts Lebanon."

Who this is for

• Classicists. The Perseus Greek and Latin canons plus First1KGreek — 2,209 Greek and Latin editions with 872 aligned English translations (show <urn> --parallel pairs Vergil line by line). TLG-style proximity search, lemma-aware:

  $ bin/nabu search λόγος --near θεός --window 5 --lang grc
  urn:nabu:ddbdp:p.oxy:8:1151:18   [θεοσ] ην ο [λογοσ].          ← a papyrus amulet…
  urn:cts:…:tlg0031.tlg004…:1.1    …και [θεοσ] ην ο [λογοσ].     ← …quoting John 1:1
  

• Biblical scholars. The New Testament in up to fifteen registered witnesses (align "MARK 2.3" → Greek ×2, Latin ×2, Gothic, Armenian, five OCS manuscript editions incl. Assemanianus and both Marianus editions side by side, Old English, English, and — live since 2026-07-13 — Sahidic and Bohairic Coptic), the Old Testament on the Septuagint ↔ Vulgate ↔ English axis with the Greek/Hebrew Psalm numbering mapped honestly (align "PSA 22.1" shows WEB's 23.1 labeled).

• Slavists & textual critics. The OCS canon complete — Marianus, Zographensis, Assemanianus, Savvina kniga, Suprasliensis (folio-line cited, hyphen-split words searchable whole) — plus Old East Slavic from birchbark to Ruthenian chancery texts, and the ~1000 CE Freising Manuscripts in three aligned transcription layers. align REF --collate turns the aligned witnesses into an apparatus: a raw-token diff per script family (the four Helsinki-ASCII CCMH codices collated against each other; the Cyrillic Marianus set beside them, honestly not collated because the fold cannot bridge the two transcription systems).

• Comparativists. The reconstruction shelf walks attested words to their proto-forms and cognates, with corpus attestation counts:

  $ bin/nabu etym богъ --lang chu
  богъ [chu] → *bogъ [sla-pro] — gloss: god
  ← *bʰeh₂g- [ine-pro] — gloss: to divide, distribute, allot
    reflexes: [grc] ἔφᾰγον, [sa] भक्ष (bhakṣá), …
  

  Pure-ASCII input works (etym bhewgh); --long expands every reflex. And cognates crosses that crosswalk with the alignment hub — verses where the witnesses use reflexes of the same root, found blind:

  $ bin/nabu cognates "LUKE 14.34" --langs got,chu
  LUKE 14.34  *sḗh₂l [ine-pro · attribution]
      chu  соль — attested as солъ
      got  salt
  

  The whole Gothic × OCS NT yields ~300 such verses across 30 roots in under a second (hlaifs ~ хлѣбъ, malan ~ млѣти, menoþs ~ мѣсѧць), each hit labeled with its meet shelf — a gem-pro meet for a Slav