Department I

In his argument with Carnap, Quine did not rule out that a distinction between analytic and synthetic statements was possible. Instead, he criticized that Carnap could not present an extensional criterion for this distinction. I will propose such a criterion, building on a subtlety that Quine ignored in his argument with Carnap but acknowledged in his later work: the difference between an observation statement and an observation conditional. Thus, I will provide extensional definitions of empirical analytic statements, non-empirical analytic statements and synthetic statements. Finally, I will sketch a simple explanation for (confirmation) holism that elucidates the link between holism and analytic statements.

Are all documents written to be read? Do all sponsors and authors of a text have a specific audience in mind? Can texts that are inaccessible and/or out of view be defined as restricted? In 2010, Hilgert brought the subject of the restricted presence of text in focus and a conference was organized on this topic in 2011 within the framework of the CRC 933. In his article, Hilgert used as one example of “restricted presence” the foundation deposits of Mesopotamian rulers. This paper addresses in more detail these written offerings deposited in the foundations of Mesopotamian temples in the 3rd millennium and evaluates aspects of visibility, intended audience and the purpose of “restricting texts”.

"In the desert of Iraq, in the al-Qadisiyah province, close to the small village of Afak and the once mighty religious center of Mesopotamia Nippur, lay a small site, known locally as Drehem, three mounds all in all, deserted and full of holes. Once under the shelter of the god Dagan, once a huge administrative complex that held the lives and heard the voices of hundreds, bureaucrats and craftsmen, soldiers and guards, dogs and sheep, priests and priestesses, kings and queens, cooks and butchers, poor and wealthy. Until one day in 2026 BCE, a couple of years after Ibbi-Sin had ascended to the throne, it was abandoned. It lay hidden for many years; a hidden gem decorating the desert. Until it was found almost 3900 years later. By poor and rich, by villagers and collectors. And since then, the once mighty Puzrish-Dagan has been skimmed. Holes in the hundreds have been dug penetrating the rooms where once scribes and bureaucrats roamed.

Thousands of tablets have been taken away, separated from each other and flooded antiquities markets from Europe to Asia, from Australia to America. Within these thousands of objects, a small unimportant tablet written by a scribe in the winter of 2042 BCE and a round tag, beautifully written and sealed with the seal of the director of the livestock agency that operated at Puzrish-Dagan sometime in the spring of 2042 BCE. Homeless they wandered, from Iraq to Paris, from Paris to St Petersburg, from Iraq to New York, from New York to Chicago.

After millennia of oblivion and years of travelling, both tablet and tag have found a new home. Far away from each other, with an ocean and a continent between them, these two that were so close together for more than 4000 years, in the soils of what is now Iraq, deep down in the marshlands that once were, are back together. In a virtual space that is, on the Internet and the online webpages of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative project. Both have now acquired different names, or better to say IDs; the tablet now known as P124003, the tag as P212288. Their home now is the virtual world; they are everywhere and every time. Their lives and travels interwoven with poverty, chaos, fear, and pain, wealth, order, excitement, and scholarship. This is their biography."

This paper discusses efforts to create a relational database to document Ancient Near Eastern seals, sealings, and seal impressions. The aim of this paper is to report on the existence of such a project, as well as its background, methods, and future perspectives. A brief overview of glyptic art and sealing practices is given before the structure of the database is explained in detail. /search/seals>. All dates in this article are bc and the Middle Chronology has been followed, unless stated otherwise. Christina Tsouparopoulou would like to thank Artemis Karnava, Peter Miglus, and Kristina Sauer for their many useful comments, as well as the anonymous reviewer for his/her numerous suggestions, which greatly improved the structure of this article. CT would also like to thank Nils Oldsen for his help with the bibliography, as well as the other participants in the ongoing seminar on seals at the University of Heidelberg for their valuable contributions to the topic. Notwithstanding, all errors remain ours. 2 The term Ancient Near East is understood here to include Anatolia, Syro-Palestine, Iran, and Mesopotamia, roughly corresponding to the following modern Middle Eastern countries: Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. While the focus until now has been on Mesopotamia (both north and south), the database as it has been structured enables the inclusion of seals and sealings from all regions in the Ancient Near East. Christina Tsouparopoulou: Progress Report Studia Orientalia Electronica 2 (2014): 37-68 Christina Tsouparopoulou: Progress Report Studia Orientalia Electronica 2 (2014): 37-68

Mining 15,000 cuneiform inscribed clay documents, albeit with about 10 lines of text each, this article discusses elements appearing on these tablets beyond text which accentuated in a visual way the structure of the documents and usually aided or, in some instances, obscured their reading and subsequent interpretation. These paratextual markers and graphic devices are left-edge inscriptions, rulings, blank spaces, and sealings that added information not available from the text alone.

In my forthcoming article on Gula the healing goddess and the dog handlers from the Drehem texts, I observe that one of the overseers of the dog handlers related to Gula, Nawir-ilum the medical practitioner (for whom see Wu Yuhong 2008), was dead for nearly a year (he died in Šu-Suen 8 x; see CUSAS 3, 251 rev. 3, and possibly also CUSAS 3, 250, on tablet Rev. 1; for offerings to the libation place of Nawir-ilum, the sa2-du11 ki-a-nag Na-wi-ir-ilum, see CUSAS 3, 982, 4, dated to Ibbi-Suen 2), while the scribes continued to include his name in the texts designating him the overseer of the handlers of Gula's dogs (MVN 13, 89, dated to Šu-Suen 8 xii; UDT 171 dated to Šu-Suen 9 iii; PDT 1, 7, dated to Šu-Suen 9 ix). It evidently took the scribes (or rather their administration?) quite some time to correctly identify the new overseer and acknowledge the change in office; Nawir-ilum was only 'officially'

Thousands of Ur III cuneiform tablets flooded the antiquities markets in the 1910s and 1920s and filled small and large museums and collections around the world. Thanks to the painstaking research of many scholars, both past and present, we are today in a position to ‘locate’ tablets and documents originating from the tell of Drehem  and to differentiate them from those originating from the other sites of the South, such as Umma, Girsu, Ur, Nippur, and most recently Iri-Sagrig and Garšana. We should be able nowadays to put these disparate tablets into hypothetical archives based on patterns and content (Sallaberger 1999; ibid 2004; Paoletti 2012; Tsouparopoulou 2013a). But how correct can our hypotheses be? How certain can we be that our visualization of how this organization of the vast documentation worked is accurate and renders the chaîne opératoire of past bureaucrats at Tell Drehem?
With this article, I intend to put into scientific inquiry - and thus prove or disprove - a theory based on the study of the sealing and archiving practices from material looted from the ancient site of Puzriš-Dagan (modern Drehem) and dispersed in collections around the world. This is done knowing that in due course the publication of the preliminary official Iraqi excavations led by Dr. Shalkham at Drehem and consequently the publication of the tablets unearthed during this excavation by Shalkham and Dr. al-Mutawalli, will see the light of day. Indeed, while writing these lines, the first publication of five such texts excavated in 2007 at Drehem were published in the Sumer volume of 2012, printed in 2013 (al-Mutawalli & Shalkham 2012). It seems to be only a matter of time before our hypotheses can finally be tested.