Table of Contents
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?
- Abbreviations for AssyriologyA 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.)
- The 'Maru -e'The 'Maru -e' History of research Yoshikawa introduced the basic classification system of the Sumerian verb according to their hamtu/maru stem in a 1968 paper. There he proposed a so-called affixation class, the maru class of whose verbs was derived simply by suffixing a particle -e to the hamtu base. This became known as the maru -e. Yoshikawa saw this -e embedded in the so-called '-ed' morpheme, arguing that it was actually a compound /-e/ + /-d/. As a result, analyzed the pronomial maru su…
- Wiseman, Donald JohnName Wiseman, Donald John Dates 1918 - February 2, 2010 Specialization Assyriology, Near Eastern and Anatolian Archaeology Major works The Alalakh Tablets, London 1953 CCT 5, London 1956 (with S. Smith) Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (626-556 B.C.) in the British Museum, London 1956 The Vassal-Treaties of Esarhaddon (Iraq 20/1), London 1958 Cylinder Seals of Western Asia, London 1959 Fifty Masterpieces of Ancient Near Eastern Art, London 1960 (with R.D. Barnett) Catalogue of the Western …
- How did Sumerian die?How did Sumerian die? This often debated question is more complex, both in its meaning and its possible answers, than casual consideration might suggest. True, everyone has a concrete idea of what a living (or 'modern') language is, as well as a dead one. The former is spoken by individuals in some community in the course of their daily interactions, while the latter has no one who speaks it in his daily life and exists only in writing, if that at all. Nevertheless these two conceptions sit at…
- Aaboe, Asger HartvigName Aaboe, Asger Hartvig Dates 26 April 1922 - 19 January 2007 Birthplace Copenhagen, Denmark Specialization Assyriology, History of Science Major works *On Babylonian Planetary Theories, Yale Dissertation 1957 *On the Tables of Planetary Visibility in the Almagest and the Handy Tables. Munksgaard, 1960 *Episodes from the Early History of Mathematics. Random House 1964 *Contributions to the study of Babylonian Lunar Theory. (with Norman Hamilton). Munksgaard 1979 *Saros Cycle Dates and…
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
Still Working
We're working an a new and faster version of the CDLI-Wiki. Please be patient…
Discussion