Posted on 10/15/2009 10:27:10 AM PDT by decimon
![](http://news.uchicago.edu/images/assets/091014.aramaic.jpg")
Tablets uncovered at Persepolis in Iran are covered with writing in Aramaic. The archive, being studied at the University of Chicago, provides new insights on the language, which has been written and spoken in the Middle East continuously since ancient times. (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago)
New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East’s oldest continuously spoken and written languages.
Members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California are helping the University’s Oriental Institute make very high-quality electronic images of nearly 700 Aramaic administrative documents. The Aramaic texts were incised in the surfaces of clay tablets with styluses or inked on the tablets with brushes or pens. Some tablets have both incised and inked texts.
Discovered in Iran, these tablets form one of the largest groups of ancient Aramaic records ever found. They are part of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, an immense group of administrative documents written and compiled about 500 B.C. at Persepolis, one of the capitals of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Archaeologists from the Oriental Institute discovered the archive in 1933, and the Iranian government has loaned it to the Oriental Institute since 1936 for preservation, study, analysis and publication.
The Persepolis texts have started to provide scholars with new knowledge about Imperial Aramaic, the dialect used for international communication and record-keeping in many parts of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires, including parts of the administration at the imperial court of Persepolis. These texts have even greater value because they are so closely connected with documents written in other ancient languages by the same administration at Persepolis.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.uchicago.edu ...
ARTHUR: There! Look!
LANCELOT: What does it say?
GALAHAD: What language is that?
ARTHUR: Brother Maynard! You are a scholar.
MAYNARD: It’s Aramaic!
GALAHAD: Of course! Joseph of Arimathea!
LANCELOT: ‘Course!
ARTHUR: What does it say?
MAYNARD: It reads, ‘Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of aaarrrrggh’.
ARTHUR: What?
MAYNARD: ‘...The Castle of aaarrrrggh’.
BEDEVERE: What is that?
MAYNARD: He must have died while carving it.
LANCELOT: Oh, come on!
MAYNARD: Well, that’s what it says.
ARTHUR: Look, if he was dying, he wouldn’t bother to carve ‘aarrggh’. He’d just say it!
MAYNARD: Well, that’s what’s carved in the rock!
GALAHAD: Perhaps he was dictating.
ARTHUR: Oh, shut up. Well, does it say anything else?
MAYNARD: No. Just ‘aaarrrrggh’.
LANCELOT: Aaaauugggh.
ARTHUR: Aarrrggh.
BEDEVERE: Do you suppose he meant the Camaaaaaargue?
GALAHAD: Where’s that?
BEDEVERE: France, I think.
LANCELOT: Isn’t there a ‘Saint Aaauuves’ in Cornwall?
ARTHUR: No, that’s ‘Saint Ives’.
LANCELOT: Oh, yes. Saint Iiiiives.
KNIGHTS: Iiiiives.
BEDEVERE: Oooohoohohooo!
LANCELOT: No, no. ‘Aaaauugggh’, at the back of the throat. Aaauugh.
BEDEVERE: N— no. No, no, no, no. ‘Oooooooh’, in surprise and alarm.
LANCELOT: Oh, you mean sort of a ‘aaaah’!
BEDEVERE: Yes, but I— aaaaaah!
ARTHUR: Oooh!
GALAHAD: My God!
[dramatic chord]
[roar]
MAYNARD: It’s the legendary Black Beast of Aaarrrrggh!
[Black Beast of Aaarrrrggh eats BROTHER MAYNARD]
BEDEVERE: That’s it! That’s it!
ARTHUR: Run away!
KNIGHTS: Run away!
[roar]
Run away! Run awaaay! Run awaaaaay!
[roar]
Keep running!
Multilingual ping.
LOL! What a great look on Chapman’s face. Oh man, that’s classic stuff. It never, ever gets old. Thanks for the laugh!
The Edicts of King Ashoka
Colorado State University Computer Science Department | 1993 | An English Rendering by Ven. S. Dhammika
Posted on 07/18/2004 7:46:23 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/1173637/posts
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Thanks decimon. |
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Workers at Persepolis excavate the city during an Oriental Institute expedition in the 1930s.
The following linked article gives great background on the tens of thousands of tablets in this collection, their study (including the services of the cryptographer who first cracked "Venona"), and the lawsuit that threatens to remove them from the hands of scholars. The following are a few introductory paragraphs.
Paying with the Past - Chicago Magazine - December 2008
In March 1933, an archaeological expedition from the Oriental Institute, a division of the University of Chicago, was working in southwestern Iran among the ruins of Persepolis, the onetime capital of the ancient Persian Empire. While building a road for trucks to bring in drinking water, laborers accidentally uncovered a huge archive of 2,500-year-old clay tablets, inscribed with wedge-shaped cuneiform characters, that had been stored inside a fortification wall.
Five decades later, in October 1983, a terrorist drove a Mercedes truck loaded with explosives into the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut and killed 241 American servicemen. Fourteen years after that, in September 1997, terrorists set off suitcase bombs at Ben Yehuda, a popular pedestrian shopping mall in Jerusalem, killing five people and wounding nearly 200. Claiming that Iran underwrote both bombings, the U.S. survivors and family members of those who were killed sued that country in separate federal lawsuits in Washington, D.C., in 2001. Iran did not make an appearance, and the plaintiffs won a total of more than $3 billion in default judgments.
The tablets, basically an administrative record, chronicle the distribution of food within Persepolis and the surrounding region.
Now these disparate elements are coming together in a Chicago courtroom. The plaintiffs in the bombing cases say that the only way they can collect what is owed to them is to force the sale of the Persepolis tablets, currently at the University of Chicago on loan from Iran, and they have filed lawsuits demanding that the archive go on the auction block.
If the plaintiffs succeed, it would be the first time that most of them had received compensation for the injuries and losses they have suffered because they or their loved ones were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Such a ruling, however, could also mean the loss of a cultural treasure that is an irreplaceable window into the past simply because it, too, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Whatever the outcome in Chicago, the lawsuits, now before U.S. District Court judge Blanche M. Manning, are expected to wend their way through the appeals process and, in all likelihood, on to the U.S. Supreme Court. And as they do so, they will continue to raise complex and troubling questions about how to weigh the claims of the blameless victims of terrorism against those of equally blameless scholars and museums...
Thanks.
Can’t tell if that top picture is doctored.
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