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?
- ContributeThe CDLI is a collaborative project with capture and text processing efforts underway in North America, Europe and the Middle East. We adhere to a policy of open access, making our data sets of text and images available over the internet to any user for free. There are two ways you can contribute to our mission: Financially, through a tax deductible donation to the CDLI Foundation, or by providing, catalogues, transliterations, and/or digital images of cuneiform tablets that are not already in …
- ContributeThe CDLI is a collaborative project with capture and text processing efforts underway in North America, Europe and the Middle East. We adhere to a policy of open access, making our data sets of text and images available over the internet to any user for free. There are two ways you can contribute to our mission: Financially, through a tax deductible donation to the CDLI Foundation, or by providing, catalogues, transliterations, and/or digital images of cuneiform tablets that are not already in …
- Proto-ElamiteProto-Elamite is the last un-deciphered writing system from the Ancient Near East with a substantial number of sources (more than 1600 published texts). Proto-Elamite has been known for more than 100 years. What is proto-Elamite? Writing phases Basic Semantic Classification of Signary
- 3rd Millennium Administrative ArchivesPisan dub-ba Texts from the 3rd Millennium To reading ša13/pisan-dub-ba s. Remco de Maaijer, BiOr 57, 104, quoting Veenhof RAI 30, 16 (cited David I. Owen, JCS 52 n. 11). The precise relationship between the profession ša13-dub-ba and the filing baskets pisan dub-ba is a matter of further research. To dub/kišib gid2-da s. Claus Wilcke, NABU 2006/21 ("eine (Schuld)urkunde prolongieren").
- Ur IIIintroduction blurb .... The Name Ur III The period commonly known as the Ur III period—short for the Third Dynasty of Ur—has been named according to its place in the Sumerian King List (SKL), where it figures as the third dynasty originating in Ur holding hegemony over Sumer. The existence of a Second Ur Dynasty has been doubted, but the name Ur III remains standard.
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