About cdli:wiki

cdli:wiki represents the efforts of CDLI staff and collaborators to offer Assyriological tools for specialists in cuneiform studies, general content for informal learners, and information about the work flow of the project.

The articles are arranged under five main categories placed in the navigation bar on the left: writing and language, history, archaeology, science and religion, and tools and resources. In the main column below we have placed a news feed (RSS) displaying recently added and updated articles from cdliwiki, followed by a "CDLI News" blog with dates and communications of the CDLI.

The topic Text Comments represents a new feature in CDLI where registered users can comment on individual texts in the CDLI database. It will thus complement the catalogue, the transliterations database, and the image database, together making up the core of the project.

What's new in cdli:wiki?

  • 3rd millennium administrative archives
    pisan dub-ba texts from the 3rd millennium Literature: François Thureau-Dangin, "Le panier à tablettes," OLZ 10 (1907) 444-446; Leon Legrain, Le Temps des rois d'Ur (1912) p. 22; Clarence E. Keiser, Cuneiform Bullae of the Third Millennium BC (=BRM 3; New York 1914), pp. 10-11, 14-14;
  • The Late Uruk Period
    Introduction The earliest true script in man's history emerged at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. in ancient Babylonia, the southern part of today's Iraq. The signs of this script were impressed with the aid of a stylus into the still soft surface of clay tablets. Such clay tablets hardened almost immediately in the dry and hot climate of that part of the world. As a result of this hardening, and because such lumps of clay could not be reused, these documents from early Babylonia survive…
  • Amar-Suen
    Amar-Suen (2046-2038 BC) Although Amar-Suen succeeded his father Shulgi (2112-2004) and ruled as the third king of Ur III dynasty for a period of nine-years (2046-2038), little is known about him. He is not mentioned in economic texts that date to his father’s reign, and the only documents that specifically mention Amar-Suen by name and that date to his reign are building inscriptions (Michalowski 1977:155).
  • Abbreviations for Assyriology
    A A: tablets in the collections of the Oriental Institute, Univ. of Chicago A2: lex. series a2 = idu Aa: lex. series a2 || A = naqu; MSL 14, 201ff. AAA: Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology (Liverpool 1908 -1948) AAAS (aka AAS): Annales archélogiques de Syrie, (from 1966) Annales archéologiques arabes syriennes. Revue d'archéologie et d'histoire (Damascus 1951 ff.)

CDLI News

Some thoughts on textual witnesses for synthetic texts

One of the things that we've actually used the wiki for in the past is putting together working editions of literary texts. In reference to this kind of work, Jacob raised the issue recently about how these working editions should link to CDLI data and, in turn, how comments on individual texts introduced via the comment feature on CDLI pages can be fed back into working editions in the wiki.

Ideally, the first major section in any synthetic working edition (based on multiple witnesses) should outline which particular p-numbered texts are the basis for the partitur, the synthetic text and any comments about the text as a whole. At present, these are being built up in an idiosyncratic way in, for example, the Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta partitur that a couple students in my Sumerian class are building (see http://cdliwiki.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/doku.php/enmerkar_and_the_lord_of_aratta under Witnesses). It would be better, I think, to have a section of witnesses organized on the basis of p-numbers (and with sigla merely serving as an auxiliary for building partituren rather than as page names; this would also avoid the namespace problems described earlier). This would look a lot like the http://cdliwiki.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/doku.php/text_comments page with an individual wiki page for each witness. But these links to the individual witness pages and to images and transliterations on the CDLI page would appear as part of the synthetic page for each individual literary composition rather than on the Text Comments page.

One interesting possibility would be to see if these individual witness pages as well as synthetic working editions could be generated programmatically on the basis of information in the CDLI catalog or even ETCSL in conjunction with a template for synthetic literary texts. This would allow contributors to add fragments of transliteration, comments and so forth to any particular witness in the literary corpora without having to worry about building the individual and synthetic pages beforehand.

JCJ

Things Done and Things To Do

I started the Documentation about the installed plug ins of this wiki. Furthermore some missing helper plug ins are installed, too. And I'm watching the RSS feed. In my opinion it's updating but we will see.

There are some patches necessary due to the fact I installed the discussion plug in. If there are some disturbing error messages don't worry, they will disappear soon. ;-)

Remaining issues

I deleted a few entries from text comment these are still in the list, however. I am using this entry to test the update of the RSS feed as well. We should think about the naming practice for articles. Naming articles "a" etc. makes no good sense unless we have created a namespace (and thus a subfolder) for the topic (i.e. witnesses to a certain composition). This should be determined as soon as possible. JLD

Feed did not update yet, one hour has passed. JLD

· 2008/03/07 03:14 · Jacob Dahl · 0 Comments

Still Working

We're working an a new and faster version of the CDLI-Wiki. Please be patient…

· 2008/03/05 07:10 · Jörg Kantel · 0 Comments
start.txt · Last modified: 2008/08/14 09:51 by kantel
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