About the project
In the seventh century BC the Assyrian monarch was the most powerful human being in the whole Middle East. Hundreds of letters, queries and reports show scholars advising the Assyrian royal family on matters ominous, astrological and medical, often with direct impact on political affairs. Along with court poetry and royal prophecies, they give an extraordinary vivid insight into the actual practice of scholarship in the context of the first well-documented courtly patronage of scientific activity in world history.
Six crucial edited volumes of Assyrian scholarly writings - letters, poetry, queries and reports - are now out of print or difficult to get hold of:
- A. Livingstone, Assyrian court poetry and literary miscellanea (State Archives of Assyria 3), Helsinki 1989
- I. Starr, Queries to the Sungod: divination and politics in Sargonid Assyria (State Archives of Assyria 4), Helsinki 1990
- H. Hunger, Astrological reports to Assyrian kings (State Archives of Assyria 8), Helsinki 1992
- S. Parpola, Assyrian prophecies (State Archives of Assyria 9), Helsinki 1997
- S. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian scholars (State Archives of Assyria 10), Helsinki 1993
- S. Cole and P. Machinist, Letters from priests to kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal (State Archives of Assyria 13), Helsinki 1999
With the kind permission of the authors and the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project [http://www.helsinki.fi/science/saa/], this project brings together translations and transliterations of all 1600 of these texts. We have also added a wealth of material from our undergraduate lectures and seminars to support our own teaching and to provide resources for colleagues in history of science and religion who do not have access to specialist libraries.
Timing, development, and feedback
The project began in January 2007 and this website went online in September 2007. The current version of the website was corrected and updated in July 2008. It includes the following new features:
- Letters, Queries, and Reports: Access to volumes 3, 9, and 13 of the State Archives of Assyria series; collations and joins to some astrological reports; many new links to original publications via ETANA [http://www.etana.org/]
- Highlights: photographs of 29 featured tablets from the British Museum
- People, Gods, and Places: 262 new or updated entries
- Technical Terms: 69 new entries
- Bibliography: many new links to JSTOR [http://www.jstor.org/] and Google Books; PDFs of the introductions to SAA 3, 9, and 13
The next phase of work will take place during the summer of 2009. We welcome suggestions and comments, to the email address assyria@camtools.cam.ac.uk.
Sponsors
The project is funded by an e-learning grant from the Higher Education Academy's Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies [http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk/]. Much of Eleanor Robson's time on the project in 2007 was supported by an Early Career Fellowship from the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities [http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk] at the University of Cambridge.
Software development
The website is based on a design by George MacKerron for the Whipple Museum [http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple/], and was created using his Electrostatic software. The transliteration and translation files were originally coded by Bob Whiting for the Text Corpus of Neo-Assyrian Project [http://www.helsinki.fi/science/saa/]. They were converted to ATF [http://cdl.museum.upenn.edu/doc/ATF/], the Cuneiform Digital Library [http://cdl.museum.upenn.edu/]'s standard encoding by Steve Tinney, who also wrote the pager which displays them.
Project team
Consultants and contributors of transliterations and translations
- Steven W. Cole, Director of Faculty Evaluation, Northwestern University
- Hermann Hunger, Emeritus Professor of Assyriology, Universität Wien
- Alasdair Livingstone, Reader in Assyriology, University of Birmingham
- Peter B. Machinist, Hancock Professor of Hebrew and other Oriental Languages, Harvard University
- Simo Parpola, Director of the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project [http://www.helsinki.fi/science/saa/] and Professor of Assyriology, University of Helsinki
- Ivan Starr, Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern and Asian Studies, Wayne State University
Other contributors
- Heather Baker, Institut für Orientalistik [http://www.univie.ac.at/orienntalistik], Universität Wien
- L. Bobrova, Moscow
- Jeannette Fincke, TCMO Assyriologie [http://www.tcmo.leidenuniv.nl/assyriologie/index.php3], Universiteit Leiden
- Irving Finkel, Department of the Middle East [http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/the_museum/departments/me.aspx], the British Museum, London
- Benjamin Foster, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations [http://www.yale.edu/nelc/], Yale University
- Mark Geller, Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/home/index.php], University College London
- Frans van Koppen, FCE Archaeology, Birkbeck College [http://www.bbk.ac.uk/], University of London
- Erle Leichty, Babylonian Section, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia [http://www.museum.upenn.edu]
- Piotr Michalowski, Department of Near Eastern Studies [http://www.umich.edu/~neareast/], University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
- A. Militarev, Moscow
- Julian Reade, London
- Francesca Rochberg, Department of Near Eastern Studies [http://neareastern.berkeley.edu/], University of California Berkeley
- Marten Stol, Leiden
- Jon Taylor, Department of the Middle East [http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/ane/anehome.html], The British Museum, London
- Clemency Williams, Philosophy and Religious Studies [http://www.phil.canterbury.ac.nz/], University of Canterbury, New Zealand
