Bilinguals in Late Mesopotamian Scholarship

FAIN: HG-50029-11

University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6205)
Stephen John Tinney (Project Director: November 2010 to June 2015)

The development of a catalog and textual editions for a corpus of cuneiform texts from the first millennium BCE.

The project aims to significantly enrich the resources for the study of the political and religious practice and the intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE. We will focus on the corpus of cuneiform tablets inscribed with bilingual myths, incantations and liturgies written in the two main languages of the civilization: Sumerian and Akkadian. These texts constitute a crucial part of the learning common to the scribal elite of the time and provide important comparisons and contrasts to intellectual and religious innovations occurring elsewhere across contemporary Eurasia, such as Greek philosophy, Biblical prophecy, Buddhism and Confucianism. We will enhance access to this primary documentation by creating an online core corpus of these texts together with an introductory portal, search aids and translations which will open the material up to both specialists and non-specialists.