Ancient Civilizations of Anatolia

A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, edited by Jeremy Black, Andrew George, and Nicholas Postgate, with the assistance of Tina Breckwoldt, Graham Cunningham, Marie-Christine Ludwig, Clemens Reichel, Jonathan Blanchard Smith, Junko Taniguchi and Cornelia Wunsch, was published in Wiesbaden in 1999 by Harrassowitz Verlag, and reprinted the following year with minor corrections. This archive is intended to act as a supplement for users of the dictionary, fulfilling several functions as described below.

The Getty vocabularies contain structured terminology for art, architecture, decorative arts and other material culture, archival materials, visual surrogates, and bibliographic materials. Compliant with international standards, they provide authoritative information for catalogers and researchers, and can be used to enhance access to databases and Web sites. The Getty Vocabularies grow through contributions. The vocabulary data is available for licensing and accessible free of charge below for more limited online use.

The following lexicon contains 1,255 Sumerian logogram words and 2,511 Sumerian compound words. A logogram is a reading of a cuneiform sign which represents a word in the spoken language. Sumerian scribes invented the practice of writing in cuneiform on clay tablets sometime around 3400 B.C. in the Uruk/Warka region in the south of ancient Iraq. [The etymology of 'Iraq' may come from this region, biblical Erech. Medieval Arabic sources used the name 'Iraq' as a geographical term for the area in the south and center of the modern republic.] The Sumerian language spoken by the inventors of writing is known to us through a large body of texts and through bilingual cuneiform dictionaries of Sumerian and Akkadian, the language of their Semitic successors, to which Sumerian is not related. These bilingual dictionaries date from the Old Babylonian period (1800-1600 B.C.), by which time Sumerian had ceased to be spoken, except by the scribes. The earliest and most important words in Sumerian had their own cuneiform signs, whose origins were pictographic, making an initial repertoire of about a thousand signs or logograms. Beyond these words, two-thirds of this lexicon now consists of words that are transparent compounds of separate logogram words. I have greatly expanded the section containing compounds in this version, but I know that many more compound words could be added.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was conceived to provide more than lexical information alone, more than a one-to-one equivalent between Akkadian and English words. By presenting each word in a meaningful context, usually with a full and idiomatic translation, it recreates the cultural milieu and thus in many ways assumes the function of an encyclopedia. Its source material ranges in time from the third millennium b.c. to the first century a.d., and in geographic area from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Zagros Mountains in the east.

The Hittite language is the earliest preserved member of the Indo-European family of languages. It was written on clay tablets in central Asia Minor over a five hundred year span (c. 1650–1180 b.c.) which witnessed the rise, the floruit, and the decline of many political powers in the Near East. It is studied today for a wide variety of reasons.

Sumerian is the first language for which we have written evidence and its literature the earliest known. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a project of the University of Oxford, comprises a selection of nearly 400 literary compositions recorded on sources which come from ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and date to the late third and early second millennia BCE.

The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, started in 1986, is a long-term undertaking to

collect all published and unpublished Neo-Assyrian texts into an electronic database, Corpus of Neo-Assyrian (CNA), and maintain the database as a research tool;
use the CNA database to publish up-to-date critical text editions of texts written in Neo-Assyrian in a series of volumes organized by text genre (SAA);
produce a journal as a medium for the publication of new texts and studies relating to the Assyrian Empire or Assyria in general (SAAB);
publish a series of monographic studies based on the texts published in the SAA series or other sources on various topics related to Assyria (SAAS);
publish a series of facsimile cuneiform texts, for both classroom and general research use, based primarily on the texts from Assurbanipal’s library (SAACT);
publish a series of critical text editions of literary texts based primarily on cuneiform texts from Assurbanipal’s library (SAALT);
publish a complete name book and who was who of the Neo-Assyrian empire based on the CNA database and supplementary materials (PNA);
create a toponym database that can be used to generate a Digital Map of the Ancient Near East. This project is being carried out with the collaboration of The Casco Bay Assyriological Institute and the Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients;
create and publish a dictionary of the language used in the Neo-Assyrian period attested in the texts in the CNA database as an (Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary).

The PSD is preparing an exhaustive dictionary of the Sumerian language which aims to be useful to non-specialists as well as Sumerologists. In addition, we are developing tools and datasets for working with the Sumerian language and its text-corpora. All materials will be made freely available on this website.

The Encyclopaedia of the Hellenic World (EHW) is an original electronic project aiming at collecting, recording, documenting, presenting and promoting the historical data that testify to the presence of Hellenic culture throughout time and space.