Posted on 12/11/2003 1:34:28 PM PST by blam
Online dictionary helps unravel Sumerian language
Digital technology facilitates research
Kyle Cassidy
Special to The Daily Star
Scholars studying ancient writing systems to reconstruct the societies they belonged to are increasingly turning to digital dictionaries in an effort to accelerate their work.
Among the institutions taking advantage of the considerable benefits offered by the digitizing process is the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which is drawing on the latest digital technology to write a Sumerian dictionary.
Four thousand years ago, in the Sumerian city of Nippur, scribes were attending classes to learn a relatively new and privileged profession: writing.
Practicing their trade on soft clay tablets with a reed stylus, these students prepared for a career in the vast bureaucracy that formed the backbone of Mesopotamian civilization. For the next several millennia, several Middle Eastern cultures the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Elamites, Hittites and Assyrians would use the wedge-shaped letters known as cuneiform to write letters, record their taxes, and remember their myths.
Ancient Nippur, 160 kilometers south of modern Baghdad, was a bustling city in its day. Yet by 1889, the booming metropolis had been reduced to a pile of detritus 18 meters high. At that time, John Henry Haynes of the University of Pennsylvania found himself directing an archeological dig across a city a 1.6 kilometers long and half as wide.
During excavations, Haynes and his assistant John Punditt Peters found the site riddled with clay tablets. In 12 seasons, the expedition discovered some 30,000 tablets, portions of which are now archived at the University of Pennsylvania, the Hilprecht-Sammlung Vorderasiatischer Altertumer (Hilprecht Collection of Near Eastern Antiquities) of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, and Istanbul Archeological Museum in Turkey.
The Nippur tablets would have been useless had Sir Henry Rawlinson, an English officer, diplomat and scholar of ancient languages, not discovered three inscriptions in modern southwest Iran in 1835. A veritable Babylonian Rosetta stone, Rawlinson’s find was written in three languages Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite on a cliff 90 meters above the ground.
Ascending a wooden ladder, Rawlinson copied the texts and began the task of deciphering them. After translating the Persian version, Rawlinson deciphered the others, moving from the known to the unknown language.
By the time Haynes arrived at Nippur, Rawlinson had made great strides on Akkadian, a separate and younger Mesopotamian language and distant sister of Arabic.
Since it used the same cuneiform writing system as Sumerian, Akkadian was key to deciphering the older language.
Rawlinson’s discovery generated a growing interest in the Sumerian language and led to other projects aimed at recovering tablets. Many of the Nippur tablets were brought to the University of Pennsylvania where scholars studied them.
But with thousands of excavated tablets scattered across the world’s museums, scholars had difficulty getting a broader view of the vocabulary and grammar.
To improve communication between scholars, in 1954 the University of Chicago began publishing the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, a multi-volume work of word lists.
Some 20 years later, Professors Erle Leichty and Ake Sjoberg started a similar project for Sumerian at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Under Leichty and Sjoberg’s guidance, scholars carefully examined the thousands of cuneiform tablets in the university’s collection, many of which had never been translated before.
The dictionary, which began as a wall-size collection of filing cabinets filled with note cards, was expected to take 40 years to complete. In 1984, Leichty and Sjoberg’s hard work was rewarded when the University of Pennsylvania Press released a single volume representing the solitary letter “B.” In the years that followed, three more volumes appeared which together comprised the letter “A.”
Leichty and Sjoberg’s efforts have been passed on to the project’s new director, Steve Tinney. Under Tinney’s direction, the project is moving toward a digital format. Scholars work full time in the Museum’s famed Tablet Room to publish digital photographs of their entire tablet collection on the internet. Funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sumerian Dictionary project is staffed by seven people who have spearheaded the digitizing process. So far, the project staff has developed several digital techniques for recording high-resolution images of each tablet.
Similar projects such as the Cuneiform Dictionary Library Initiative, run by the University of California at Los Angeles and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, hope to provide scholars around the world with unprecedented access to a previously unimaginable library of texts.
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