The Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI)

The Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI) 

A key objective of the newly established Chair for the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East is the promotion of the digital humanities and easily accessible open-access data in order to widely disseminate, facilitate, and promote the active use and understanding of official inscriptions and archival texts of the Middle East in Antiquity, with an initial focus on those of ancient Mesopotamia (written in the cuneiform script and in the Akkadian and Sumerian languages), in academia and beyond. Headed by Prof. Dr. Karen Radner and Dr. Jamie Novotny, the MOCCI research staff seeks to create new and innovative ways for users to access the important and varied contents of numerous geo-referenced and linguistically-annotated editions of ancient records, primarily from the first millennium BC. Our aim is to make many of the rich primary sources of Assyria, Babylonia, and their contemporaries available online for free in a fully searchable and richly annotated (lemmatized) format.

Current work

At the moment, our work focuses on two principal digital text corpora:
(1) Official Inscriptions of the Middle East in Antiquity (OIMEA); and
(2) Archival Texts of the Middle East in Antiquity (ATMEA).
(1) The Official Inscriptions of the Middle East in Antiquity (OIMEA) project includes several sub-projects that are directly or indirectly managed by various members of our team, in particular Alexa Bartelmus and Jamie Novotny. In addition to Akkadian and Sumerian texts, OIMEA will include other corpora of official inscriptions written in other languages, including Aramaic, Luwian, Phoenician, Old Persian, and Urartian. The current OIMEA projects are:
(a) The Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online (RIAo);
(b) The Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia online (RIBo);
(c) The Inscriptions of Suhu online (Suhu);
(d) Electronic Corpus of Urartian Texts (eCUT); and
(e) Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions online (ARIo).