Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts
Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts
Journal/Series title:
Stahl Field Report
Place published:
Near East
Abstract:
Funding from the Stahl Endowment in 2018 was used for adding more material to the Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Lists (DCCLT). Lexical texts are lists of words and lists of cuneiform signs that were used by ancient Mesopotamian scribes and scholars to teach and document the complex cuneiform writing system. These texts play an important role in the study of the history of education and scholarship, but are also of crucial and foundational importance for the decipherment of cuneiform and the reconstruction of Sumerian vocabulary. Last year's effort added, among other things, important bilingual lists of hides and leather objects and of metal objects. The editions are freely available through the internet; the data can also be downloaded in JSON format for re-use (for instance in Computational Text Analysis).
Image: School tablet from Nippur (ca. 500 BCE), now in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (CBS 6510). The text has brief extracts from the list of the hides and the list of metal objects. The left column has the words in Sumerian with Akkadian translations to the right.
