Digital Pasts Lab

This study explores the personal copyist statement in the tablet colophons, the scribes who appear in them and the tablets’ findspots in order to demonstrate the relationships between text, scribe and the scholarly work environment of Hattusa in the late Empire period (second half of the 13th cent. BC). It is initially demonstrated how Hittite scribal statements were appended to specific types of texts and had a recurring structure that reflects their purpose. A look at festivals follows. Two large Hittite festivals, the hisuwa and AN.TAH.SUM, were both prepared by scholars related to or working under Walwaziti, the chief scribe of Hattusili III, and his family. However, at some point, perhaps during the reign of Tudhaliya IV, the complex work on the AN.TAH.SUM festival came under the authority of another scribal group, that of Anuwanza. In this context it is also considered whether certain shelf lists may have been accounts of tablets removed from an archival section.

Ancient writing systems employ logographic and logophonetic principles playing on the relationship between writing, script and scribal learning. The workshop proceedings published in this volume explore the way these relationships encode knowledge and meaning reflected in the social, historical and cultural mentalité of the early peoples of East Asia (China and Japan), Anatolia, the Aegean, Egypt and Mesoamerica. The meeting was organized in the FU Berlin on the fall of 2010 by the editor and Dr. Renata Landgráfová (now Charles University, Prague) in the frame of the DFG research training group 1458 “Notational Iconicity” (“Schriftbildlichkeit”) headed by Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum and Sybille Krämer.

Cuneiform was not just a writing system, it was a culture. The attributes of this “Babylonian” culture expanded to all reaches of the ancient Near East in the course of the second millennium BCE. Hittite scribes adopted and adapted this writing culture to their own needs sometime during the 16th century BCE. In this book I analyse texts from dozens of Hittite scribes copying, editing and writing up cuneiform manuscripts on clay in Hattusa, the capital of the Late Bronze Age Hittite Empire in Anatolia. Beside identifying their manuscripts, I place the scribes in their social and official setting and study the principal elements of their handwriting, in an attempt to identify scribal schools and writing habits, as well as advance our tools for forensic handwriting recognition. The book also contains studies of external features of clay tablets (diplomatics), editions of many colophons and related textual passages on scribes, and a look at scribal signatures and their nature as markers of authorship and scribal specialisation.
Links were added to book reviews by:
G. Torri 2017 (WZKM)
Y. Feder 2017 (RBL)

A comprehensive study dedicated to Akkadian and Sumerian logograms in Hittite texts, also termed Akkadograms and Sumerograms, has long been a desideratum in Hittitology. Be it on the level of grammar, morphology or phonetic pronunciation; their possible origins and diffusion across Mesopotamia and its Western Periphery; and use of logograms as a tool in textual criticism (especially dating of manuscripts and as part of scribal habits). Hence, the book under review, a reworked version of the Author’s 2007 SOAS doctoral dissertation (London), is already impressive by attempting to fill the gap on at least part of these topics, based on analyses of an extensive corpus of Sumerograms and Akkadograms (Other reviews of the present volume are van den Hout, Th. ZA 102 [2013]: 344-347; Torri, G. “Hiding Words behimd the Signs: The Use of Logograms in Hittite Scribal Praxis.” OrNS 81 [2012]: 124-132).
The author supplied us with a masterful treatment of an important facet of Hittite lexical and scribal lore. As I have tried to emphasize, this study advances our understanding of some difficult and obscure writings, scribal habits and modes of transmission. The author should be congratulated on his rigorous study and for producing a much needed research tool

The International Conference Priests and Priesthood in the Near East will investigate how individual and collective identities of priests were fashioned: the ways by which priests conceptualized their status and aspired to integrate into a particular social, economic and religious environment, or the means by which priests manipulated the socio-political matrices in order to gain status or wealth. Hence, the focus of the workshop will shift from studying priests as mediators between man and god, or as representatives of temple institutions. Rather the workshop will discuss different aspects of the life of priests: political, cultic, intellectual, entrepreneurial or personal. The multi-faceted life of priesthood will be placed at the centre of our concern.
The conference is of the immediate relevance to all those studying how religious or sacred men and women shaped our common heritage of belief and social practices throughout history from early times to our very time and age. It appeals to scholars of all historical and social disciplines, including Anthropology, Archaeology, Art History, Biblical Studies, Jewish Philosophy and Classics.
The importance of the workshop lies in its broad diachronic and synchronic view of clerical life and identity, through a variety of evidence – be it the ancient world, classical sources, or material culture. The dialogue between scholars of different fields will stimulate usage of a more nuanced terminology and eventually lead to a better definition and modeling of priesthood in Biblical, Near Eastern, Indian and Classical civilizations.

It is extremely important that this conference will be live broadcasted given the rise in interest of the scholarly community with the project, its results and the central place Tel Aviv university will have in their dissemination to the public.

In this article we deal with Nebuchadnezzar’s removal from office of the High Priest of Uruk’s main temple, the Eanna, during a formative period of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The incident is tied historically and politically to the process of state building and imperial consolidation associated with this monarch, especially in the second quarter of the 6th century b.c.e., at the Neo-Babylonian empire’s “Augustan Threshhold.”
Keywords: Neo-Babylonian State Building, Uruk, Eanna Archives, Priestly Families, Nūr-Sîn Family

Numbered Tablets in the Persepolis Fortification Archive "Evidence on the numbering of tablets" wrote Richard T. Hallock in the introduction to his magisterial edition of 2,087 Elamite documents from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, "is scanty." He listed three documents called first (Elamite appukana) tablets (

This paper presents ACCWSI (Attentive Context Clustering WSI), a method for Word Sense Induction, suitable for languages with limited resources. Pretrained on a small corpus and given an ambiguous word (a query word) and a set of excerpts that contain it, ACCWSI uses an attention mechanism for generating context-aware embeddings, distinguishing between the different senses assigned to the query word. These embeddings are then clustered to provide groups of main common uses of the query word. We show that ACCWSI performs well on the SemEval-2 2010 WSI task.
ACCWSI also demonstrates practical applicability for shedding light on the meanings of ambiguous words in ancient languages, such as Classical Hebrew and Akkadian. In the near future, we intend to turn ACCWSI into a practical tool for linguists and historians.