Joachim Marzahn
(Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin)
Presented to the CDLI Avalon Meeting, October 2001
In our experience, three
factors have most forcefully contributed to the cooperation of the
Vorderasiatisches Museum with the CDLI:
1.
The
general interest of the highest administrative level of the Stiftung
Preussischer Kulturbesitz. The current president, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, who
assumed his position in 1998, has pushed for the development in the direction
of collection digitization, with obvious advantages for our project. It may be
that we will find a similar situation in other museums. If at first
the goals of
a cooperation can be impressed upon the administrative levels of the museums,
museum staff will carry less of the load in making the case for the
project.
2. A
well-conceived plan by the directors and initial participants of the project
leaving little doubt about the likeliness of the project's
success.
3.
Financial
and logistic support by a outside agencies, without whose help the whole
undertaking would not have been possible.
We must be grateful for
the confluence of these factors in our case, so that in the end no one at the
VAM harbored serious doubts that our interests and those of the project CDLI
were inherently the same. Thanks are particularly due Hans Nissen and Bob
Englund as the original wellspring for the project, and to Peter
Damerow and the
direction and collaborators of the Max Planck Institute for the History of
Science (MPIWG) in Berlin (with special thanks to Michael Schuering and Markus
Schnoepf), who all offered their expertise, their home budgets, and also a lot
of time, the most valuable thing we have. We also say thank you to the Stiftung
Preussischer Kulturbesitz and - last but not least - to Hans Nohka, the
administrator of our depot, for his patience and resourcefulness. Through their
help and our common work, it was possible to recognize that what might at first
appear to be a grave difficulty can, in time, prove to be a great opportunity
for the museum.
The details of
our cooperation
need not be repeated here, since we have made this information available in the
pages of the CDLI/VAM online presentation of our collection of early cuneiform
(see http://cdli.ucla.edu/infovam_e.htm [dead link; now: http://128.97.154.154/cdli/vam/infovam_e.html]
and http://cdli.ucla.edu/overview_e.htm [dead link; now: http://128.97.154.154/cdli/vam/overview_e.html]
). In short: we began at the VAM with a forerunner to the current
project, the Archaic Texts of Uruk directed
by Nissen, but have, in the meantime, a real "initiative" in the CDLI, and
we in Berlin are justifiably proud to be the first who have in association with
this group of researchers been able to bring online a substantial portion of
our archival holdings.
But no pride without
limitations: and this can explain something about the structure of the project
and its effects beyond the CDLI. I already mentioned that the highest level of
museum administration in Berlin supported us. To underscore this fact, a joint
press conference was held together with the directorate of the MPIWG in June of
2001, about the same time that the VAM catalogue and image archive went online.
Unfortunately, the journalistic response was less than overwhelming, although
the articles that resulted from this press conference were uniformly of a high
quality (mostly we experience the opposite). The question is: was the topic of
the online presentation the reason for a tepid response, is there so little
interest in cuneiform? Normally inter-media occasions find many interested
people, why not in our case?
We must confess that there
is less interest in cuneiform among the public than we might wish, and that
means mainly the writing system and its form, not really the contents of what
we call early writing. When we first glance at the monitors of CDLI, we see the
picture and some physical information about a text, not the cultural background
of the document. What we see is not very spectacular. This shows us that we are
still at a stage comparable with the current position of Near Eastern history
within museums. We will still find many more people interested in ancient
Egyptian mummies or in classical statues and busts than is the case with
Babylonian finds. This may be similar for the presentation of hieroglyphic
texts or manuscripts of Roman poets, although the cuneiform script, or better
the documents written with this system, can be much more humanly
authentic.
It seems that we do not
yet have a situation of general acceptance of our discipline, not yet a
break-through to change this obviously unequal relationship, and I believe that
this is a remarkable factor to be considered even where we might be able to
demonstrate the enormous benefits our project can offer. We must admit that
even in our own field we encounter a certain diffidence toward what we do. The
anticipation that all colleagues who work in the field of cuneiform studies
will use this new internet media to improve their working environment has not
really been realized. At least I came to this opinion after talking to various
colleagues in Berlin, even if we consider that not every cuneiform specialist
in this city is occupied with the 3rd millennium.
Therefore, I think the
question is also: can we continue without any kind of advertising, will it
break through alone? Or can we achieve greater acceptance with still larger
data sets of tablet documentation? Who is using the pages of the CDLI? Merely
to tabulate web-counter numbers is not sufficient either, although even here I
suspect the numbers will not be inspiring. We need in any case to engender a
much broader interest in the web users of the CDLI to insure the continuation
of our now living project.
So it may be useful to
mark out here a certain position. As I have already mentioned, the Late Uruk
material was the object of study at the beginning of this project, and it was
of course very useful to include the next existing sources in the project from
an historical point of view. Perhaps also Englund's special inclination for
Sumerian texts brought the work to this expansion. This has surely been
supported by the structure of the Berlin collection, since it contains more
than 4,000 items of the periods of CDLI interest. That number can be considered
a manageable quantity at this stage of the project.
The inclusion of published
and unpublished texts was discussed within the museum, along with a
consideration of the possibilities of using the material for commercial
purposes. We did not determine now whether there will be sufficient cause to
produce "classical" forms of publications later; certainly, the love
of printed books is still alive, and volumes filled with hand copies are still
accepted as perfect forms of publication and presentation of cuneiform
material.
The CDLI/VAM data set
contained, from its inception, the "classical" text information we
need particularly in our administration, such as measurements, provenience,
number of lines of the text, photo numbers and so on. And so we also have at
the same time a number of external restrictions and guidelines that have
determined the content and volume of the project up to now, and we are eager to
find out if the character of other collections will change, or confirm this
tendency empirically.
The structure of the data
catalogue has disadvantages and advantages. First the disadvantages: it can
only be used by a relatively small number of specialists and still needs a
great amount of supplementary data, further requiring a great amount of time
and participation of colleagues. So far, data structure has been determined
primarily by the actually involved persons, and thus includes only a part of
the data that should be used from the perspective of a museum. But exactly at
this point we can find an important interface: the CDLI data can be included in
the currently fast-growing databases used by museum administrations in Europe
and America, since it already contains part of the required items, and this in
a compatible format. Here it should be allowed to ask whether in future the
more academic character of the CDLI should be continued as is, or whether we
should include clearer visible entries and information for a more general
circle of users. The somewhat self-contradicting situation of clashing
interests might be moved into a more harmonic
cooperation.
What can we do? The
project was born and developed from working with cuneiform administrative
documents, i.e., with a genre of literature which still is held to be less
enlightening than the "real" historical sources of royal inscriptions,
literature and the like. This special situation of focus on receipts and
accounts is due in part to the content of the Berlin collection, but not only
to this. Even if certain scholars feed exclusively from this trough, as I also
prefer to do, surely we should be sensitive to a broader public and not avoid
including different text genres in our presentation of early cuneiform.
Concerning, for instance, literary or historical sources, of course, Berlin's
collection is relatively not as extensive as that of London, Paris or
Philadelphia. But the CDLI "visitor" should find in future an
increasing focus also on the texts which can lead him in the more usual way to
the cultural-historical background of the ancient Orient.
Perhaps the CDLI can
become a true virtual library by exploiting the strengths of other projects,
such as that of the Sumerian Literature group in Oxford (http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/
), whose presentations add to the CDLI a function similar to that of museums:
the presentation of monuments, i.e., written monuments in the natural sense,
suitable to make clear for the user the rich variability of literary tradition
in Babylonia. Of course, this should not assume a general change of the present
character of the CDLI, rather a kind of supplementation of its content to
reflect in a general sense the task of a museum. In choosing this path, we
would likely reach a wider public than heretofore, and we also would have a
chance to ameliorate a still widespread problem within Assyriology: the
separation of scholar from original text. We can perhaps care for a real
meeting of the two.
That may sounds a bit
ironical, but it becomes clearer if we remember that still too often only the
simple content of a text finds the attention of a specialist. Let us remember,
for instance, the form of publication of the Fara material in Berlin at the
beginning of the last century, or that of the famous ED IIIb royal
inscriptions, CIRPL, by
Sollberger. It is possible in these cases to read every line in every column of
that text publication, but you scarcely get any idea of how the text is
distributed on the physical monument. A positive publication example
is the more
recent edition of the so-called ancient kudurrus by Gelb, Steinkeller and
Whiting (OIP 104). In perusing the
inscriptions of this book, the reader will frequently find in a companion
volume corresponding photos of the physical objects containing the
inscriptions.
But even the addition of
pictures or photos cannot overcome the distance from the original that the
modern scholar senses: the reading of the ancient sources does not regularly
occur from the original surface of a document - at least if we consider the use
of common publications. Thus he still uses the hand copy or transliteration,
and the photo will be seen only as a helpful but dispensable instrument. This
cannot be the way to correctly "feel" how the ancient reader consumed texts. No
Babylonian or Sumerian scribe, or even stonemason - should the latter have been
literate - has ever inserted a copy or a transliteration between his eyes and
the tablet or stone writing surface. He read from "the page" and
could enjoy the inseparable connection between himself and the different forms
of materials and genres of monuments. That is a feeling that we today can only
experience with difficulty, by the way. This is my own experience, because,
while we did gather in a Berlin project all illustrations of 3rd millennium
monuments, we were often surprised by the fact that the real shape and
appearance of a presumably well-known document exhibited an unexpected
variability among all the hitherto known published forms. We felt it would be
worthwhile for all scholars to have a look at the stones and metals, not just
the inscription, every time they consulted a text. This could represent be a
chance to rewrite in a modest way the history of written communication in
Babylonia.
As all curators know,
there are a multitude of things to do in a museum that leave precious little
time for the scientific research we might prefer to spend our time on.
Therefore, a museum staff member is by his nature somewhat suspicious, and not
a little jealous of his or her time, when colleagues arrive proposals for
important and very long-term projects. The now ancient project Archaic Texts
of Uruk initiated by Hans Nissen and
so successfully, sometimes aggressively pushed forward by him and his
associates
M. Green and R. Englund, approached us in this way, but at the same time it was
also very different. From the very beginning, that project succeeded in
building up a certain level of confidence that the practical work with the
museum's material could be limited to well-planned arrangements, presentations
of lists with tablet numbers and the preparation of tablets by the
administrator. The remainder of the work was performed by Englund without
further ado, and so it developed that the project, with more then 1,000 items
of study, resulted in little interruption for the actual museum
organization.
Following this commodious
experience, we felt we could cooperate with the CDLI, a project much larger
than its predecessor, and surely requiring much more time. However, we felt we
had a great advantage: the already processed texts of the "archaic
project" could serve as the foundation of the new project, and so we began
under the assumption that a large part of the task was already done. In reality
we would learn that this was not true, since, first of all, we had a certain
number of technical problems. We had to reexamine a number of texts, and also
to make entirely new scans - later on, complete new sets of digital photographs
where the quality of flatbed scans was not sufficient. Nevertheless, the
experiences we have made have been very helpful in arriving at new decisions in
how we can best support the project. This was not so much important on the more
personal level we had enjoyed, but on the official, administrative level within
the museum. A successful cooperation with continually open lines of
communication helps to sustain the process.
Once more: this is of
special interest if a museum like ours has too few staff members or volunteers
to support such a huge task for a long period, because this will become a
problem of increasing scope when the number of tablets steadily rises, and the
time involved in scanning grows before the staff's eyes, or when the process
becomes more and more confusing, made the more difficult by the need for
constant transportation of a large number of pieces. We had these problems from
time to time, above all because non-staff members are generally not allowed to
work in the depot area. Museums which can place the work stations of the CDLI
or like projects in the depot itself will probably have less difficulties, although I imagine that the
project will encounter the same conservative policy in every large
museum.
In this case, it can be
very helpful if participants can agree to place the whole project management on
a level relatively removed from the museum's tasks. To impress upon partners
that the undertaking is one mutual assistance, with anticipated and obvious
advantages for the museum both at the level of archiving and documenting the
level of preservation of its collections, and at the level of involving its
staff in the research into the correlations and contexts of the museum's
treasures, should be a clear task for the CDLI in future
endeavors.
At this point, I think the
CDLI has perhaps its greatest opportunity: to guide both interested scholars
and non-specialists to the material of written monuments in their unity of form
and content. Add to this, of course, the necessary path to the highlights of
written tradition that should be the interface between our work and the public
we serve. In this way, we can help to make of the CDLI a virtual museum of the
ancient inscriptions of the Orient, and thus offer a portal to the real sense
of this work, namely, doing our best to recreate the social, indeed the
emotional atmosphere that finally produced these many documents. This would to
my mind be a worthwhile vision for the duration of the project. We at the
Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin hope to do our part to realize
this goal.