Wednesday, February 25, 2015

West Semitic Research Project

http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp/

From the Information Page:
The West Semitic Research Project is an academic project affiliated with the University of Southern California School of Religion and directed by Dr. Bruce Zuckerman. For the past 32 years WSRP has used advanced photographic and computer imaging techniques to document objects and texts from the ancient world. In doing this we have built a vast collection of images that we are now making available to scholars, students, educators and the general public through a variety of ways.
Leningrad Codex
Bruce Zuckerman and Marilyn Lundberg photographing the Leningrad Codex in the Russian National Library (Saltkov-Shchedrin) as part of a joint project between West Semitic Research and the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, California.
WSRP was started in the early 1980s by Bruce Zuckerman and his brother Kenneth. Bruce, a scholar and teacher of the Bible and ancient Semitic languages, was frustrated by the lack of good photographs of important ancient inscriptions. With the help of his brother, Ken, he set out to remedy the situation.
The study of ancient writing is called epigraphy. In this field it has been typical of scholars who read ancient texts to do their own reading, produce a drawing of the text and publish the drawing, translation and transcription as the main tool for study. Photographs, if provided, can rarely be used for study. The reason is that the photographs are either taken by scholars who know little about photography, or by photographers who cannot read what they are looking at and so may miss important data.
The most important principle that governs the work of the WSRP is the combining of good photography with knowledge of the scripts and languages. We believe in training scholars to be good photographers, or at least encouraging them to work closely with photographers to get the best possible results.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Sources of Early Akkadian Literature (SEAL)

http://www.seal.uni-leipzig.de/

From the home page"

SEAL: A Text Corpus of Babylonian and Assyrian Literary Texts from the 3rd and 2nd Millennia BCE

Sources of Early Akkadian Literature is a joint project of the Institute of Archaeology of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Altorientalisches Institut of the University of Leipzig.
 Project Description
Akkadian, i.e. Babylonian and Assyrian, literature, documented on cuneiform tablets from Ancient Mesopotamia (together with Sumerian and Egyptian literature) forms the oldest written literature of mankind.
In the 3rd and 2nd Millennia (c. 2400-1100 BCE), Akkadian literature developed many different literary genres: hymns, lamentations, prayers to various gods, incantations against a range of sources of evil, love-lyrics, wisdom literature (proverbs, fables, riddles), as well as long epics and myths - roughly 550 different compositions. Many of these compositions are not yet published in satisfactory modern editions or scattered throughout a large number of publications.

SEAL ("Sources of Early Akkadian Literature"), which started at 2007, is updated regularly. It aims to compile a complete indexed corpus of Akkadian literary texts from the 3rd and 2nd Millennia BCE, attempting to enable the efficient study of the entire early Akkadian literature in all its philological, literary, and historical aspects.

Many of the editions in SEAL rely on new collations and photos. (For the moment being, these photos cannot be shown publicly due to restricted copy rights.)
As part of this project SEAL will publish the corpus in printed form, in monographs within the new series Leipziger Altorientalistische Studien. Several volumes are currently in preparation:
  • N. Wasserman: Old Babylonian Incantations.
  • N. Wasserman: Love Lyrics.
  • M. P. Streck: Old Babylonian Hymns.
  • Elyze Zomer: Middle Babylonian Incantations.
  • J. Fechner will publish a monograph on "Altbabylonische Gottesbriefe" outside the SEAL series.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Codex Vaticanus online

http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.1209

Handwritten, uncial, zoomable in all its glory!

A sample page (Judges 1):

Friday, February 6, 2015

NoDictionaries (online Latin dictionary)

http://nodictionaries.com/

It's nice to know that there's recourse to Latin terms besides paper dictionaries and Google Translate!