Papers by Paola Negri Scafa
The fifty letters found at Tell Harmal can provide a significant evidence on the relationships am... more The fifty letters found at Tell Harmal can provide a significant evidence on the relationships among citizens, local authorities and the Palace in the kingdom of Esnunna. They also offer important elements for a study of the Esnunna old Babylonian grammar. For these reasons these texts have been selected as a first step in the e-Shnunna Project, that is part of the most complex TIGRIS Project. In this project, beside the assyriological methodologies, ENEA-GRID facilities are employed: they include an innovative approach to the study of cuneiform corpora by a software application for Text Analysis (TaLTaC2) and Data Mining tools (ASTEC). In this paper, some preliminary results, obtained mainly thanks the experimental analysis, are presented. A detailed description of procedures and systems employed in studying documents is also given and the general project is synthetically presented. Several clusters obtained by the software application are analysed in order to reconstruct some proc...
Thanks to the "Duplicazione e Rinascita" Project, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Aff... more Thanks to the "Duplicazione e Rinascita" Project, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and aimed at supporting the Baghdad Museum, since the beginning of the year 2000 studies have begun in ENEA, with the purpose of protecting material goods and the great deal of knowledge of the ancient civilizations fluorieshed in the Ancient Mesopotamia, now Iraq. Altough the studies, projects and activities carried out share the use of data processing in the broadest sense, they focus on three different lines of research, which have faced and are still facing the problem of preservation of ancient artifacts or - equally important - maintenance and dissemination of ancient knowledge from different standpoints. The three technologies at issue are: the Reverse Engineering and Rapid Prototyping; the integration of Language Technologies (Multilingual Text Mining) and GRID Technologies in the ENEA-GRID Infrastructure, for the analysis of ancient texts in Assyriology; the use of ICT Tech...
Assyriology uses new technologies for computer encoding of cuneiform texts, to support the analys... more Assyriology uses new technologies for computer encoding of cuneiform texts, to support the analysis and management of a great deal of data coming from tablets. At the present, integrating e-tools in the GRID virtual environment opens new perspectives in the analysis of ancient texts and enables ENEA-GRID for e-Humanities, with a particular attention devoted to Assyriology. Therefore, after a preliminary study, an experimental application of new technologies to the Nuzi Corpus has been carried out, using Multilingual Text Mining in ancient languages, in view of an integration into the digital environment of the ENEA GRID. This innovative approach into the study of cuneiform corpora may influence software developments and collaborative working in order to match the specific needs of scholars communities. This case-study is an exploratory study of text mining on cuneiform corpora, and network visualization of relationships among texts. First results shows that the integration of e-tool...
Tradition and Innovation in the Ancient Near East
Archaeology and Anthropology of Death by Paola Negri Scafa
Forthcoming in V. Nizzo (ed.), Archaeology and Anthropology of Death, Rome 2016
Eccezione rituale, "partibilità" e "oggettificazione" del corpo, strategie per definire un'identi... more Eccezione rituale, "partibilità" e "oggettificazione" del corpo, strategie per definire un'identità. Il caso della tomba 93 di San Montano La tomba 93 di San Montano, databile al V secolo a.C., si presta a una serie di riflessioni 1) sull'anomalia del rito funerario relativa alla classe d'età del defunto; 2)sulla manipolazione dei corpi come linguaggio simbolico e 3) sulla selezione di oggetti e iconografie significativi riconducibili a un ben preciso orizzonte ideologico. 1) Anomalia del rito funerario. La tomba 93 è la cremazione di un bambino di circa 8 anni, rituale minoritario nella fase cronologica in esame (su un totale di 60 tombe databili al V e IV secolo, infatti, le cremazioni sono solo 17) e di norma, come nell'età più antica 1 , destinato a individui di età adulta: l'unica cremazione infantile è appunto quella in esame. Oltre al trattamento del corpo, anche l'apprestamento della tomba è peculiare: i resti cremati sono stati avvolti in un panno e deposti in un cratere attico a colonnette alloggiato in un ricettacolo di tufo, secondo un rituale comune solo alla vicina tomba 94. Tale tipologia rievoca, in forma potremmo dire "riattualizzata", quella nota fin dall'età orientalizzante a Cuma, di ascendenza euboica e riservata al ceto aristocratico.
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Papers by Paola Negri Scafa
Archaeology and Anthropology of Death by Paola Negri Scafa