The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, or Oracc, is an ongoing project designed to make the corpus of cuneiform compositions from the ancient Near East available online and accessible to users. The project, created by Steve Tinney of the University of Pennsylvania, incorporates a number of sub-projects, including online publications of lemmatized texts in different genres, as well as extensive annotations and other tools for studying and learning about the ancient Near East. The sub-projects are directed by individual scholars specializing in the relevant topic. The overall project is led by a steering committee of Tinney, Eleanor Robson of Cambridge University, and Niek Veldhuis of the University of California, Berkeley. [1]
Oracc currently includes several different kinds of projects. Some gather and present historical information for studying certain areas of ancient Near Eastern life or scholarship, including projects designed to contextualize specific textual corpora ("portals"). [2] Others provide interfaces for searching corpora. These usually incorporate full transliterations and translations of texts in a given corpus, and many offer supplementary material such as an introduction to the corpus, discussion of its historical context, and interpretive syntheses of its content. A few other projects serve as research tools for Assyriological studies (dictionary, sign list).
Project Name | Description | Director |
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AEB: Assyrian Empire Builders | A portal providing context for the letters of the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II and his administrative officials, with links to the relevant texts in Oracc's SAAo project. | Karen Radner at University College London (funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council) |
AMGG: Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses | Provides thorough, encyclopedia-style articles on the major gods and goddesses of Mesopotamia. | Nicole Brisch (funded by the UK Higher Education Academy, 2011) |
K&P: Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire | A portal providing context for and interpretations of scholarly letters, queries and reports from the Neo-Assyrian capital of Nineveh, with links to the relevant texts in Oracc’s SAAo project | Karen Radner at University College London and Eleanor Robson at the University of Cambridge (funded by the UK Higher Education Academy, 2007–10) |
Nimrud: Materialities of Assyrian Knowledge Production | An ongoing project intended to provide a collection of online resources concerning the ancient Assyrian city of Kalhu (modern Nimrud) and to create "biographies" of objects from the site. [3] | Eleanor Robson at the University of Cambridge (funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council) |
Project Name | Description | Director |
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Amarna: The Amarna Texts | Provides searchable transliterations of the cuneiform texts found at Tell el-Amarna. | Contributed by Shlomo Izre'el |
CAMS: Corpus of Ancient Mesopotamian Scholarship | Offers searchable editions of texts, divided into sub-projects (some of which also include contextual information and interpretations). Texts and corpora include the Epic of Anzu (project title Anzu); the Akkadian poem Ludlul bēl nēmeqi (project title Ludlul); texts on extispicy (project title Barutu); scholarly texts from four ancient “libraries” (project title Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia, or GKAB) and Seleucid building inscriptions (project title Seleucid Building Inscriptions, or SelBI). [4] | various scholars |
CDLI: The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative | Interface for searching transliterations of texts on the CDLI website (a project designed to make images and text of cuneiform documents available online). [5] | Bob Englund at University of California, Los Angeles |
CTIJ: Cuneiform Texts Mentioning Israelites, Judeans, and Other Related Groups | Provides searchable list of cuneiform texts relating to Israelite, Judean, and related population groups dating to the mid-first millennium BCE. Also offers a brief historical background to the topic. | Ran Zadok and Yoram Cohen (funded by the "Ancient Israel" (New Horizons) Research Program of Tel Aviv University) |
DCCLT: Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts | Provides searchable, lemmatized transliterations of cuneiform lexical lists, as well as contextual information about the genre and specific lists. | Niek Veldhuis at University of California, Berkeley (supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities) |
DCCMT: Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Mathematical Texts | Provides searchable transliterations and translations of cuneiform mathematical texts, as well as a brief introduction to the genre and tables of Mesopotamian measurements. | Eleanor Robson at the University of Cambridge |
ETCSRI: Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions | Provides searchable, lemmatized transliterations and translations of Sumerian royal inscriptions, with an introduction to the material and thorough explanations of the lemmatization/glossing methodology. | Gábor Zólyomi at Eötvos Loránd University, Budapest (funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA)) |
HBTIN: Hellenistic Babylonia: Texts, Iconography, Names | Provides tools for studying individuals in Hellenistic Mesopotamian society, including: transliterations and translations of Hellenistic legal documents from Uruk and Babylon and links to the Hellenistic scholarly texts published in GKAB (see above under CAMS); images of seal impressions on Hellenistic Uruk legal documents; and information about individual names, and families. | Laurie Pearce at University of California, Berkeley. |
Qcat: The Q Catalogue | An ongoing project listing and transliterating compositions in the Oracc corpus. This is different from Xcat and CDLI in that it lists abstract compositions, which can be preserved in many copies, rather than the physical tablets on which copies of a composition were written (e.g., it lists the story "Gilgameš, Enkidu and the nether world" as a single entry, even though many copies of this composition exist. [6] | Eleanor Robson at the University of Cambridge |
RINAP: Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period | Provides searchable, lemmatized transliterations and translations of Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions, along with indices and contextual historical information. | Grant Frame at the University of Pennsylvania (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities) |
SAAo: State Archives of Assyria Online | Provides searchable transliterations and translations of the compositions published in the series State Archives of Assyria, which include many corpora of Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian texts. | various scholars (transliterations and translations from the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, directed by Simo Parpola) |
Xcat: The X Catalogue | Designed to be “a global registry of cuneiform manuscripts, supplementary to CDLI”. [7] This and CDLI are different from Qcat in that they list individual, physical tablets rather than abstract compositions (e.g., they have a separate entry for each written copy of the composition "Gilgameš, Enkidu and the nether world"). [6] | Eleanor Robson at the University of Cambridge |
Project Name | Description | Director |
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ePSD: electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary | An online dictionary of the Sumerian language. | Steve Tinney at the University of Pennsylvania (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities) |
OGSL: Oracc Global Sign List | Aimed at providing "a global registry of sign names, variants and readings for use by Oracc". [8] | Niek Veldhuis at University of California, Berkeley |
The Hittites were an Anatolian Indo-European people who formed one of the first major civilizations of Bronze Age West Asia. Possibly originating from beyond the Black Sea, they settled in modern day Turkey in the early 2nd millennium BC. The Hittites formed a series of polities in north-central Anatolia, including the kingdom of Kussara, the Kanesh or Nesha kingdom, and an empire centered on Hattusa. Known in modern times as the Hittite Empire, it reached its height during the mid-14th century BC under Šuppiluliuma I, when it encompassed most of Anatolia and parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.
Kültepe, also known as Kanesh or Nesha, is an archaeological site in Kayseri Province, Turkey, inhabited from the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, in the Early Bronze Age. The nearest modern city to Kültepe is Kayseri, about 20km southwest. It consisted of an Upper city, and a lower city, where an Assyrian kārum, trading colony, was found. Its ancient names are recorded in Assyrian and Hittite sources. In cuneiform inscriptions from the 20th and the 19th century BC, the city was mentioned as Kaneš (Kanesh); in later Hittite inscriptions, the city was mentioned as Neša, or occasionally as Aniša (Anisha). In 2014, the archaeological site was inscribed in the Tentative list of World Heritage Sites in Turkey. It is the place where the earliest record of a definitively Indo-European language has been found, Hittite, dated to the 20th century BC.
Tunna or Dunna was an ancient Anatolian city located at the foothills of the Taurus Mountains, near the town of Ulukışla and the Cilician Gates in southern Cappadocia.
The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia, part of present-day Turkey. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language.
Luwian, sometimes known as Luvian or Luish, is an ancient language, or group of languages, within the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The ethnonym Luwian comes from Luwiya – the name of the region in which the Luwians lived. Luwiya is attested, for example, in the Hittite laws.
Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions which form their signs. Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia.
Hittite, also known as Nesite, is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken by the Hittites, a people of Bronze Age Anatolia who created an empire centred on Hattusa, as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. The language, now long extinct, is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BC, with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from as early as the 20th century BC, making it the earliest attested use of the Indo-European languages.
The Babylonian calendar was a lunisolar calendar used in Mesopotamia from around the second millennium BCE until the Seleucid Era, and it was specifically used in Babylon from the Old Babylonian Period until the Seleucid Era. The civil lunisolar calendar was used contemporaneously with an administrative calendar of 360 days, with the latter used only in fiscal or astronomical contexts. The lunisolar calendar descends from an older Sumerian calendar used in the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE.
Assyriology, also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, is the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic study of the cultures that used cuneiform writing. The field covers Pre Dynastic Mesopotamia, Sumer, the early Sumero-Akkadian city-states, the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, the Akkadian and Imperial Aramaic speaking states of Assyria, Babylonia and the Sealand Dynasty, the migrant foreign dynasties of southern Mesopotamia, including the Gutians, Amorites, Kassites, Arameans, Suteans and Chaldeans. Assyriology can be included to cover Neolithic pre-Dynastic cultures dating to as far back as 8000 BC, to the Islamic Conquest of the 7th century AD, so the topic is significantly wider than that implied by the root "Assyria".
Tabal, later reorganised into Bīt-Burutaš or Bīt-Paruta, was a Luwian-speaking Syro-Hittite state which existed in southeastern Anatolia in the Iron Age.
Tyana, earlier known as Tuwana during the Iron Age, and Tūwanuwa during the Bronze Age, was an ancient city in the Anatolian region of Cappadocia, in modern Kemerhisar, Niğde Province, Central Anatolia, Turkey.
Burna-Buriaš II, was a king in the Kassite dynasty of Babylon, in a kingdom contemporarily called Karduniaš, ruling ca. 1359–1333 BC, where the Short and Middle chronologies have converged. Recorded as the 19th King to ascend the Kassite throne, he succeeded Kadašman-Enlil I, who was likely his father, and ruled for 27 years. He was a contemporary of the Egyptian Pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. The proverb "the time of checking the books is the shepherds' ordeal" was attributed to him in a letter to the later king Esarhaddon from his agent Mar-Issar.
Akitu or Akitum (Sumerian: 𒀉𒆠𒋾, romanized: A2.KI.TI, lit. 'festival' ) (Akkadian: 𒀉𒆠𒌈, romanized: A2.KI.TUM, lit. 'festival' ) is a spring festival and New Year's celebration, held on the first day of the Assyrian and Babylonian Nisan in ancient Mesopotamia and in Assyrian communities around the world, to celebrate the sowing of barley.
Warpalawas II was a Luwian king of the Syro-Hittite kingdom of Tuwana in the region of Tabal who reigned during the late 8th century BC, from around c. 740 to c. 705 BC.
Cybistra or Kybistra, earlier known as Ḫubišna, was a town of ancient Cappadocia or Cilicia.
Wasusarmas was a Luwian king of the Syro-Hittite kingdom of Tabal proper in the broader Tabalian region who reigned during the mid-8th century BC, from around c. 740 BC to c. 730 BC.
Tabal was a region which covered south-east Anatolia during the Iron Age.
Atuna or Tuna was a Luwian-speaking Syro-Hittite state which existed in the region of Tabal in southeastern Anatolia in the Iron Age.
Ištuanda or Ištunda was a Luwian-speaking Syro-Hittite state which existed in the region of Tabal in southeastern Anatolia in the Iron Age.