Ras Shamra Tablet Inventory
The Ras Shamra Tablet Inventory (RSTI) aspires to be
the foremost online resource for Ugarit Studies. From the celebrated
myths to the more quotidian administrative lists, the texts from Ras
Shamra-Ugarit are of great interest to students and scholars of Biblical
studies and Ancient Near Eastern studies. These ancient texts,
discovered by archaeologists beginning in 1929, provide insight into the
religious, administrative, and daily life of the kingdom of Ugarit,
some 3,200 years after its fall. After over 80 years of Ugarit studies,
researchers like those at the Oriental Institute are still establishing
reliable text editions of the thousands of texts. Printed volumes are an
inadequate solution. The field needs an innovative, collaborate, and
ambitious solution. The primary goal of RSTI is to integrate
archaeological, textual, lexical, and philological research in a single
database and present this data to researchers and the public through a
simple, widely accessible, online digital interface.
This project builds on many years of research,
including research from a pre-digital age. In 1978, Pierre Bordreuil and
Dennis Pardee set out to document critical information about every
inscribed object from Ras Shamra-Ugarit. In 1989, “La Trouvaille
Epigraphique de l’Ougarit” (TEO) appeared in the series Ras
Shamra-Ougarit, volume 5 (Éditions Recherche sur les civilisations,
volume 86). This volume presents the archaeological context of every
inscribed object, a description of the object size and type of writing,
museum numbers, publications, text editions, and general remarks. Of
course, the printed volume lacks information about the objects
discovered after 1988. During his doctoral research, Prosser endeavored
to create a relational database that included digitized TEO data, text
transcriptions, translations, glossaries, bibliographic references, and
notes. This database functioned well but was very limited. Through his
work at the Persepolis Fortification Archive project at the Oriental
Institute, Prosser became familiar with the OCHRE database system and
immediately perceived its superiority for archaeological and
philological analysis. See below for more on the OCHRE database system.
Work began on RSTI in 2011, importing data from Prosser’s relational
database and adding new data.
Deployed through both Java and familiar HTML user
interfaces, RSTI presents dynamic and interactive text editions,
prosopography research, bibliography, and related resources. RSTI uses
the Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment (OCHRE) at the
Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The OCHRE database
system was developed specifically for research in archaeology and
philology. The underlying data model is well-suited to the heterogeneous
and semi-structured nature of philological data. For more about the
OCHRE database, see www.ochre.uchicago.edu.
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