The present study offers a first comprehensive, quantifiable overview of the geographical extent and scale of the cuneiform corpus. Though one of the oldest and longest-lived scripts in history, the ...sheer size of this corpus, being among the largest discrete bodies of written source material from the pre-modern world, is seldom properly appreciated. We review and evaluate past quantitative assessments of the corpus and current levels of catalogue digitisation and integration, pointing to gaps in general catalogues and principal issues relating to the quantification and interrogation of textual sources at the corpus-level. Combining a newly developed open access spatial index of c. 600 locations from across Europe, Asia, and Africa where cuneiform texts have been found with a quantitative survey of reported finds from scholarly literature, we then proceed to discuss the formation of the cuneiform corpus as an archaeological artefact. Aided by an extremely broad diachronic and diatopic outlook on a uniquely large body of written source material, this study offers an innovative and novel perspective on written corpora as archaeological artefacts.
In the early 1990s the two fragments of black stone making up the Tower of Babylon stele with pictures of the ziggurat in Babylon and the king Nebuchadnezzar II were found in the large open trench ...from the German excavations of Amran in 1900. The findspot was about 20 m north of the Esagil temple in Babylon, but the level where it was discovered is not Neo-Babylonian but later, possibly Parthian. The archaeological and historical background of the stele is discussed, and the image of the Ziggurat on the stele is considered. After 28 years in the Schøyen Collection Oslo, the stele is now in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.
This article focuses on African-Mesopotamian relations in general and on how Egypt and Kush (in today’s Sudan) are represented in Mesopotamian chronicles specifically. Mesopotamian chronicles, which ...belong to a genre that focuses on historiography, contain references to Egypt and Kush in seven different chronicles dating to the Neo-Babylonian period and the Hellenistic period. The results of the study show that Egypt and Kush are not differentiated in the sources; that the references in question deal with military conflicts; and that Egypt appears both in positive and negative terms, thus standing in contrast to the propagandistic genre of Mesopotamian royal inscriptions. Even though Mesopotamian chronicles were primarily a matter for the scholarly elite, these texts provide one piece of the puzzle on how Egypt and Kush were regarded in ancient Mesopotamia.
David Weisberg became fascinated by Assyriology as an
undergraduate at Columbia University. Already endowed with a strong
background in Hebraica, he soon came to know that he needed the
deeper ...immersion of a graduate program, and he enrolled at Yale to
pursue it. David's interests soon focused on the Chaldean Dynasty
of Nebuchadnezzar and the Achaemenid Dynasty of Cyrus the Great.
Weisberg's thesis succeeded in illuminating the wider significance
of some previously unpublished cuneiform texts from this period?as
well as earning him the doctorate. The thesis appeared in the
recently established Yale Near Eastern Researches (1967) under the
somewhat daunting title Guild Structure and Political
Allegiance in Early Achaemenid Mesopotamia , and David's career
was launched.
Weisberg's oeuvre, as exemplified by the nearly three dozen
essays conveniently assembled in this volume, attest both to his
prodigious industriousness and to the loss that the field of
Assyriology has suffered in his untimely demise. As is clear from
the Table of Contents, he continued to make major contributions to
the study of the Neo-Babylonian period (especially regarding
political and military history and the doings of ancient royals)
but he also offered seminal insights in other areas, including
Masoretic studies, rabbinics, social and economic life of the
ancient Near East, as well as the interface between modern culture
and study of the ancient world.
-Based on W. W. Hallo's "Introduction"
Die zeitliche Dimension von Kulturgeschichte wurde lange Zeit durch die Schilderungen der Bibel, ergänzt um die Darstellung klassischer Autoren bestimmt. Mit dem frühneuzeitlichen Aufkommen der ...Naturwissenschaften bildete sich allmählich ein alternatives Paradigma heraus, das religiöse Gewissheiten in Frage stellte und geistige und geistliche Autoritäten herausforderte. Im Rahmen dieser weltanschaulichen Auseinandersetzung erhofften sich beide Seiten Unterstützung durch die Erkenntnisse der sich zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts ausbildenden Altertumswissenschaften. Ihre Vertreter waren sowohl durch die Verfahren des kritischen Quellenstudiums geprägt wie auch durch die Anwendung naturwissenschaftlicher Untersuchungsmethoden. Dabei verlief die Entwicklung von einer "biblischen Chronologie" hin zu naturwissenschaftlich und durch historische Belege gesicherten Geschichtsschreibung keineswegs linear und einseitig. Gerade aufgrund der doppelten Prägung früher Altertumswissenschaftler durch religiöse Weltbilder und die Schulung in (natur-)wissenschaftlichem Denken, entstanden immer neue Vorstellungen und Konzepte über das Alter menschlicher Kultur. Der Band setzt sich in mehreren wissenschaftshistorischen Fallstudien mit diesen Entwicklungen auseinander.
The dataset1 consists of 3D scans of one cuneiform tablet from Haft Tappeh Iran and one cuneiform tablet of the Hilprecht Collection as well as 3D annotations on these 3D meshes, including metadata. ...The 3D annotations were created with the annotation software Annotorious2 on 2D renderings and reprojected to the original 3D model. The respective 2D renderings and annotations in 2D are also part of this data publication. The annotations might be used in machine learning tasks for character recognition, linguistic studies, or visualization in Assyriology. We publish these data in different formats and give guidance on how to use them in different usage scenarios and with several software applications. The data serve as the basis for a detailed description, reasoning, and elaboration of a recommendation for the state-of-the-art handling of 3D data in cuneiform research. The data is stored as an archive on Zenodo and may serve as an example for replication by similar 3D scanning.
