Digital Access: State Archives of Assyria Online

Thursday, July 1, 2010

State Archives of Assyria Online

State Archives of Assyria Online (SAAo) is an open-access web resource that aims to make the rich Neo-Assyrian materials found in the royal archives of Nineveh, and elsewhere, more widely accessible.
Based on an existing ASCII text database created by Simo Parpola and his team at the University of Helsinki, the online transliterations and translations are those of the standard editions in the series “State Archives of Assyria”. All of the published volumes are accessible online. The web presentation and linguistic annotation are carried out using tools and standards developed by Steve Tinney (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia).

The state correspondence of king Sargon II (published in volumes 1, 5, 15 and 17) is the first chunk of the SAAo materials to have been “lemmatised”, providing glossaries and interactive translation facilities which allow the user to check and question the translations in detail and make the corpus fully searchable, in order to facilitate and encourage an active understanding of the primary sources. This is the work of a team headed by Karen Radner (University College London) and funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Other parts of the SAAo materials will be made available in the same manner by teams headed by Heather D. Baker (University of Vienna), Michael Jursa (University of Vienna) and Eleanor Robson (University of Cambridge).

Online portals provide context and explanatory materials for SAAo. Hence, the website "Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire", created by Radner, Robson and Tinney with funding from the British Higher Education Academy, is dedicated to the 7th century letters, queries and reports exchanged between kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal and their scholarly advisors. Another such portal is devoted to the 8th century political correspondence as part of the project Assyrian Empire Builders. Further portals are planned.