Bilinguals in Late Mesopotamian Scholarship (BLMS)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Markham Geller
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: from 2011 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 199131882

The first millennium BCE is intellectually one of the most creative eras known to history. All across Eurasia, in Greece, Israel, India and China—the so-called Axial Civilizations—innovative thinkers redefined the relationship between humanity and the cosmos in ways that resonate down to this day. At first glance, Mesopotamia seems to stand outside this revolution and is often seen as a static contrast to its more vibrant neighbors. Yet we possess large royal and scholarly libraries from first millennium Mesopotamia that constitute one of the largest records of intellectual engagement with the nature of the cosmos known from the ancient world. Moreover, comparison with earlier Mesopotamian corpora allow us to see that the civilization had its own evolutionary trajectory. This in turn, can be used to gain a better understanding of the other Axial civilizations whose own antecedents lack such detailed attestation. The principal difficulty in exploiting the Mesopotamian data to explain the intellectual development of the period as a whole is that a small cadre of trained researchers is faced with an overwhelmingly large corpus. The durability of the clay tablets that provided Mesopotamia's main medium for writing has ensured that primary documentation has survived from there in greater numbers than any other ancient society. Bilinguals in Late Mesopotamian Scholarship (BLMS) represents the addition of a new component to the products of a concerted effort by innovative scholars of ancient Mesopotamia to remedy this situation by developing free, open digital resources which converge on this problem. Online editions, translations, finding aids and explanations of various parts of the first millennium corpus as a whole have been developed over the past five years. BLMS in its turn will focus on one of the core groups of Mesopotamian scholarly texts from the first millennium BCE, the so-called “bilinguals”. These are myths, liturgies and incantations written in Sumerian with a native translation into Akkadian that represent part of the most treasured learning common to senior scribes of the period. The team consists of members experienced both in the editing of bilingual texts specifically and in the computer processing of Mesopotamian texts in general. Beginning with the creation of the first ever catalog of first millennium bilinguals to establish the exact parameters of the corpus, the project will create its own database of the bilingual texts from both primary documents and legacy material. This will be presented online with an introductory portal, sophisticated search capabilities and translations.The project's results will be designed to provide access to the corpus for both specialists and nonspecialists alike. The team is closely connected to a number of projects focused on various aspects of the first millennium textual record from Mesopotamia, all of which are hosted on Oracc, a corpus-building center for cuneiformists founded by PI Tinney, on which BLMS will also be hosted. As a result of this, BLMS and its peer projects will not only be mutually enriching, but also through their use of open standards, a focus on replicability and relatively simple technology, provide a base for future work as much as an end in itself. Ultimately, the aim of the project is to enrich our understanding of a crucial era in humanity's intellectual development by making one of its largest contemporary corpora accessible to scholars at large.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• International Connection: USA
• Participating Institution: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
• Cooperation Partner: Dr. Stephan Tinney