|
S. I. Wooley, et.al. in Communicating cuneiform: The evolution of a multimedia cuneiform database states that digitization of cuneiform is made possible because of “digital photography…and web publication [which] are virtually free, and this is providing new opportunities as well as posing a new challenge to the present generation of cuneiformists.”[1] Digitization of cuneiform tablets requires the “development of an electronic, on-line cuneiform database for scholarly research.”[2] This is an endeavor that can be extremely expensive because of the time and planning that it takes to make it a reality.
Some examples of Cuneiform Digital Projects include:
The Cuneiform Digital Forensic Project (CDFP) at the University of Birmingham has developed a “multimedia database to support scholarly research into cuneiform, wedge-shaped writing imprinted onto clay tablets.” One of the unique features of this database is the sign processor. The sign processor is a graphical search tool designed to allow users to draw the sign they are trying to identify and search for it in the database.[3]
The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) is an effort to make the estimated 500,000 examples of cuneiform tablets that exist, in private and public collections, available on the internet. According to the CDLI website, “more than 125,000 have been catalogued in electronic form.”[4]
According to the web article entitled Preserving Iraq's Cutural Heritage, in 2004, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the University of California, Berkeley, a grant of $99,357 “for the preparation of an online catalog of 5,000 cuneiform lexical texts (similar to modern dictionaries) housed at the the National Museum in Iraq. The cataloging records with images of the tablets, transcriptions, and annotations will be incorporated into a large database of cuneiform materials, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative.”[5] The endowment also awarded the University of California, Los Angeles, a grant of $96,588 to develop “an online catalog of cuneiform tablets at the Iraq National Museum that documents Mesopotamian civilization from 3300 B. C. E. until 100 C. E. The records will be available in a separate Web site at the museum and through the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative created by UCLA in 2000.”[6]
The Cuneiform Digital Palaeography Project (CDPP) is a joint project between the University of Birmingham and the British Museum to “establish a detailed palaeography for the cuneiform script. ... A fundamental principle of the project is that only those sources which are capable of being dated to the reign of a particular king and at least broadly provenanced will be used. ... The provision of a palaeography for cuneiform is of obvious importance in itself as a research tool but also has many secondary benefits, facilitating associated research into such matters as the writing order of wedges in a sign and the possible identification of individual scribal hands.”[7] What is palaeography? According to the National Archives in the United Kingdom, “palaeography is the study of old handwriting.”[8]
At Johns Hopkins University the Digital Hammurabi project is creating three dimensional images of cuneiform tablets. This project allows researchers to study and manipulate the tablets as if they had them in their possession without the worry of damage or destruction to the artifacts.[9]
According to Lee Watkins and Dean Snyder in their paper describing the Digital Hammurabi project, “the mission of the Digital Hammurabi team is to make available to every researcher's computer very high resolution, three dimensional models of cuneiform tablets along with the computer encoding needed to type those texts in. Building on an initial 3-year, $1.6 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, we are addressing all issues related to achieving that mission. The specific goals of the project are to:
An example of the work that is being done by the Digital Hammurabi project can be seen on the Johns Hopkins Computer Graphics Lab's website.
Cuneiform Software Applications
Massimo Pompeo is the creator of two Windows software applications to help scholars with their cuneiform research. A brief description of this software, which can be found on the Sumerian.org website, states that the Cuneiform Dictionary (TCD) is the only interactive cuneiform dictionary in the world. It can find and interpret any sign in less than 1 second. The cost of the software is an amazing $39. The Cuneiform Texts Resources (TCT) is a search engine application that searches both textual references and text parllels. It searches for sign sequences of transliterated text. “TCT is free on private, non-shared non-commercial non-public entities machines usage.”[11] To see a sample image, and for more information on downloading and registering this software visit the following webpages: The Cuneiform Dictionary and The Cuneiform Texts Resources.
References
|
