Thursday, September 26, 2013

The Semitic Roots Repository

http://www.semiticroots.net/

From the website:

This repository is dedicated to documenting and modelling every single aspect of the Semitic languages. The main database holds a record of all known roots that have been entered so far, and gives many means by which to search and compare them.
The script used for the roots is the Ancient South Arabian script known as the "Musnad". This script was chosen because it is the only known Semitic abjad that contains graphemes for all of the known Semitic phonemes. As this abjad has only recently been included in the Unicode specification, it's not included on most Operating Systems. Therefore you'll need to download the Musnad font from our downloads section. The script is fairly easy to learn (only took me about a day or two) and it is a much better choice than using Latin characters, with various modified characters to represent those letters not known in Latin-based alphabets. The use of the Musnad for the roots does not mean the roots are necessarily existent in the Ancient South Arabian languages, the script is being used as a general way to represent common Semitic roots. However when the script appears in a word, then it is being used to represent an Ancient South Arabian word.
The site has links for words, roots, and languages.

The SAA Archaeological Record

http://www.saa.org/AbouttheSociety/Publications/TheSAAArchaeologicalRecord/tabid/64/Default.aspx

From the website:

Launched in January 2001, The SAA Archaeological Record is issued five times a year. It is a four-color magazine encompassing SAA business, commentary, news, regular columns, software reviews, job listings, opinions, and articles. The SAA Archaeological Record replaced The SAA Bulletin (view back issues).

the Hebrew Union Bible Project

http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/english/units.php?cat=5015&incat=4982

Besides the following the site has links to the journal Textus, the Syro-Palestinian version of the Hebrew Bible, and the monograph series, Kitāb al-Khilaf.

From the website:


The Hebrew University Bible Project (HUBP)
The Hebrew University Bible Project – the flagship of research projects of the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University – was established in 1956 to undertake a comprehensive survey of the history of the textual development of the Hebrew Bible and to produce a major critical edition. The project was initiated by the late Prof. Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein (Professor of Semitic Linguistics and Biblical Philology), who together with the late Prof. Chaim Rabin (Professor of Hebrew Language) and  the late Prof. Shemaryahu Talmon (Professor of Biblical Studies) constituted the original board of editors.
 The staff of the Bible Project is comprised of recognized experts in the fields of textual criticism, Hebrew language, Masoretic studies and Biblical philology.

The study of the Hebrew Bible is the cornerstone of Jewish Studies, including historical, linguistic, cultural and spiritual aspects. As such, the text of this all-important body of ancient literature demands the most meticulous treatment in regard to its authenticity and history of transmission.

Many classical works of literature have been published in outstanding editions, crowning a painstaking process of collating manuscripts and examining their history, correcting corruptions or interpolations, so as to present the reader with the most authoritative and accurate version of the text possible. Yet to this day, there is no comprehensive critical edition of the Hebrew Bible providing the entire range of textual evidence collated from all extant sources.

The Aleppo Codex
The Aleppo Codex, saved from the flames when hostilities broke out against the synagogue of Aleppo in Syria, which was attacked after the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, is the oldest and most authoritative complete manuscript of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, sanctioned by the great Jewish scholar Maimonides. Brought to Israel from Syria to the late President Izhak Ben-Zvi, it serves as the basis for the text of the Bible Project edition.

The Entire Picture
The Hebrew Bible text has been handed down in manuscript form with the greatest of care by many generations of copyists. However, the further back one traces its transmission in history, the more variants are found in the witnesses to the text. This 'pluriformity' is exhibited most dramatically in the fragments of biblical scrolls dating from the late centuries BCE and the early Common Era, found in the Judean Desert (Qumran, Masada, etc.). The Bible Project edition includes all the evidence bearing on the text, listing every difference in the ancient translations: the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, the Aramaic Targums and the Syriac Peshitta. It also lists the variant readings attested in the Dead Sea scrolls, quotations of biblical verses in Rabbinic literature, and in medieval Hebrew manuscripts and commentaries.

The text of the Aleppo Codex, together with its masora, the meticulous recording of variant readings from all important witnesses, and accompanying philological notes clarifying readings listed in the apparatuses, make up the most comprehensive critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, reflecting the fruit of years of research.

A Training Ground for Scholars
 The research involved in collating the variant readings for each apparatus is carried out by four separate teams, each headed by an expert in the field. The Bible Project also functions as a training ground for promising young scholars engaged as research assistants for the various apparatuses, under the supervision of senior scholars, who gain invaluable practical experience in the field of biblical research and textual criticism. Many of these go on to become senior teachers and occupy senior academic positions at institutions of higher education both in Israel and abroad.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

The Bible and Interpretation

http://www.bibleinterp.com/

From the home page:

Dedicated to delivering the latest news, features, editorials, commentary, archaeological interpretation and excavations relevant to the study of the Bible for the public and biblical scholars.

Targum Institute

http://targum.nl/

The Targums are Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible that commenced at about the beginning of the synagogues (de Lange, Intro to Judaism, 2000). The Hebrew text would be read and an oral translation offered on the spot. In time the oral translations were written. Such translations were necessary because Hebrew had been eclipsed by Aramaic as the lingua franca of Jews. "Translations" is a bit of an understatement, because the Targums actually provided information where the Hebrew text was unclear as well as slight expansions. The Targums are thus fascinating examples of interpretation.

This website offers a number of resources for the study of Targums, including a critical introduction to Targum Samuel and a manuscript database.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Scripture Tools for Every Person (STEP)

http://www.stepbible.org/#!__/0/passage/0/ESV/Mat%201/NHV/__/1/passage/0/ESV/Mat%201/NHV

This is a wonderful resource for Biblical Studies that is developing further (with yours truly playing a small role).

Here's an overview from the main website (with an overview video):

http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/index.php?page=STEP

STEP Bible is a Tyndale House project to build high quality free reliable Bible tools, with the aim of enabling anyone who wants to study the Bible seriously to do so. This has grown out of the free Tyndale Toolbar which is being used by thousands of people all over the world.

In many parts of the world the growth of the Church is outpacing the training of leaders and teachers, and Bible schools are struggling with limited resources. Many believers do not have a computer with reliable internet access but more and more people have access to mobile phones, and many to computers with SOME internet. We have created the STEP software from the ground up with these limitations in mind.

A Digital Bridge to the Ancient World

http://www.eagle-network.eu/

From the website:
EAGLE, The Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy is a best-practice network co-funded by the European Commission, under its Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme. EAGLE will provide a single user-friendly portal to the inscriptions of the Ancient World, a massive resource for both the curious and for the scholarly.

The EAGLE Best Practice Network is part of Europeana, a multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitised items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections. EAGLE will collect, in a single readily-searchable database, more than 1.5 million items, currently scattered across 25 EU countries, as well as the east and south Mediterranean. The project will make available the vast majority of the surviving inscriptions of the Greco-Roman world, complete with the essential information about them and, for all the most important, a translation into English.

The technology that will support the EAGLE project is state-of-the-art and tailored to provide the user with the best and most intuitive possible experience. Our services will include a mobile application, enabling tourists to understand inscriptions they find on location by scanning with a smartphone, and a story-telling application that will allow teachers and experts to assemble epigraphy-based narratives. A multilingual Wiki will be set up for the enrichment and enhancement of epigraphic images and texts, which will provide a basis for future translations of inscriptions into other European languages. The results of the EAGLE project will be disseminated as widely as possible, both within the scholarly community and within the public at large. To this end, EAGLE will publish its own Wikimedia Commons, and will also develop an inscription-themed documentary with a related teaser video.
 
EAGLE will work within the Europeana, and with its sister projects, to ensure full and effective integration within this flagship project to make European culture globally available.

State Archives of Assyria Online (SAAo)

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao

From the home page:
State Archives of Assyria Online (SAAo) is an open-access web resource that aims to make the rich Neo-Assyrian materials found in the royal archives of Nineveh, and elsewhere, more widely accessible.
Based on an existing ASCII text database created by Simo Parpola and his team at the University of Helsinki, the online transliterations and translations are those of the standard editions in the series "State Archives of Assyria". All of the published volumes are accessible online, in addition to volume 2 of the companion series "State Archives of Assyria Studies", the edition of the Eponym Lists and Chronicles. The web presentation and linguistic annotation are carried out using tools and standards developed by Steve Tinney (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia).
Assyrian tablet SAA 5 241, obverse
The state correspondence of king Sargon II (published in volumes 1, 5, 15 and 17) was the first chunk of the SAAo materials to have been "lemmatised", providing glossaries and interactive translation facilities which allow the user to check and question the translations in detail and make the corpus fully searchable, in order to facilitate and encourage an active understanding of the primary sources. This is the work of a team headed by Karen Radner (University College London) and funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. The research project "Mechanisms of Communication in an Ancient Empire: The Correspondence between the King of Assyria and his Magnates in the 8th Century BC" (AH/F016581/1; 2008-2013) also included the preparation of a new edition of the Nimrud Letters, parts of the state correspondence of Tiglath-pileser III and Sargon, by Mikko Luukko (volume 19), which was published simultaneously in print and online in March 2013.

Other parts of the SAAo materials are being made available in the same manner. During his time at UCL, Mikko Luukko lemmatised the prophecies (volume 9) and part of the royal correspondence of the 7th century BC (volumes 13 and 16). Melanie Groß, as part of the research project "Royal Institutional Households in First Millennium BC Mesopotamia" (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, S 10802-G18; 2009-2011) headed by Heather D. Baker (University of Vienna), lemmatised the private legal documents (volumes 6 and 14). - As of March 2013, volumes 1, 5-6, 9, 13-17 and 19 have been lemmatised.
Assyrian tablet SAA 8 287, obverse
Online portals provide context and explanatory materials for SAAo. Hence, the website "Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire", created by Radner, Eleanor Robson (University of Cambridge) and Tinney with funding from the British Higher Education Academy, is dedicated to the 7th century letters, queries and reports exchanged between kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal and their scholarly advisors; the companion corpus is http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/knpp/corpus/. Another such portal, "Assyrian Empire Builders" is devoted to the 8th century political correspondence as part of the UCL research project, with a companion corpus at Assyrian Empire Builders. Further portals are planned.

The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/

From the home page:
Numerous royally commissioned texts were composed between 744 BC and 669 BC, a period during which Assyria became the dominant power in southwestern Asia. Six hundred to six hundred and fifty such inscriptions are known today. The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, under the direction of Professor Grant Frame of the University of Pennsylvania, will publish in print and online all of the known royal inscriptions that were composed during the reigns of the Assyrian kings Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC), Shalmaneser V (726-722 BC), Sargon II (721-705 BC), Sennacherib (704-681 BC), and Esarhaddon (680-669 BC), rulers whose deeds were also recorded in the Bible and in some classical sources. The individual texts range from short one-line labels to lengthy, detailed inscriptions with over 500 lines (2500 words) of text.

These Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions (744-669 BC) represent only a small, but important part of the vast Neo-Assyrian text corpus. They are written in the Standard Babylonian dialect of Akkadian and provide valuable insight into royal exploits, both on the battlefield and at home, royal ideology, and Assyrian religion. Most of our understanding of the political history of Assyria, and to some extent of Babylonia, comes from these sources. Because this large corpus of texts has not previously been published in one place, the RINAP Project will provide up-to-date editions (with English translations) of Assyrian royal inscriptions from the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC) to the reign of Esarhaddon (680-669 BC) in five print volumes and online, in a fully lemmatized and indexed format. The aim of the project is to make this vast text corpus easily accessible to scholars, students, and the general public. RINAP Online will allow those interested in Assyrian culture, history, language, religion, and texts to efficiently search Akkadian and Sumerian words appearing in the inscriptions and English words used in the translations. Project data will be fully integrated into the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) and the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc).

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the RINAP Project research grants in 2008, 2010, and 2012 to help carry out its work. The publications of the RINAP Project are modeled on those of the now-defunct Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) Project and carry on where its Assyrian Periods sub-series (RIMA) ended.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

The Babylonian and Oriental Record

http://archive.org/search.php?query=The%20Babylonian%20and%20oriental%20record%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts

This open access journal is venerable in that it ran from about 1886-1901. Obviously a lot has gone on since, so this may be of interest to historians of archaeology.

TextKit -- grammars of ancient Greek and Latin

http://www.textkit.com/

From the home page:

Learn Greek and Latin!

Textkit was created to help you learn Ancient Greek and Latin!
Textkit began in late 2001 as a project to develop free of charge downloads of Greek and Latin grammars, readers and answer keys. We offer a large library of over 180 of the very best Greek and Latin textkbooks on our Ancient Greek and Latin Learning pages. Since that time we have distributed millions of PDF textbook free of charge world-wide.
Our grammars, readers and keys are public domain textkbooks which Textkit has converted. Many of the very best public domain Greek and Latin grammars, such as D’Oogle’s Latin For Beginners, Smyth’s Greek Grammar and John Wiliams White’s First Greek Book were first posted to the Interent here at Textkit.

Greek and Latin Forums – Join Us!

Our Greek and Latin Forums is the center of our community and it is where you should begin your learning engagement with us.
You can get started by visiting our Learn Ancient Greek and Learn Latin areas to find more downloadable grammars, readers, lexicons and dictionaries.

Textkit’s Top 10 Ancient Greek Textkbooks, Readers and Answer Keys Downloads

Greek Grammar, William W. Goodwin
First Greek Book, John Williams White
Greek Prose Composition, North and Hillard
Greek Grammar, Herbert Weir Smyth
A First Greek Course, Sir William Smith
First Greek Grammar Syntax, W. Gunion Rutherford
First Greek Grammar Accidence, W. Gunion Rutherford

Textkit’s Top 10 Latin Grammar Book, Readers and Keys

Latin For Beginners, Benjamin L. D’Ooge
Beginner’s Latin Book, Collar and Daniell
A Latin Grammar, Charles E. Bennett
New Latin Grammar, Allen & Greenough
A New Latin Prose Composition, Charles E. Bennett
Latin for Beginner’s Key, Benjamin L. D’Ooge
Caesar’s Civil War in Latin, Charles E. Moberly
Cicero Select Orations, Benjamin L. D’Ooge
Latin Prose Composition Based on Cicero
, Henry Carr Pearson