Wednesday, October 31, 2018

The Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project

[First posted in AWOL 9 November 2015, updated 31 October 2018]

The Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project
The Hittite language is the earliest preserved member of the Indo-European family of languages. It was written on clay tablets in central Asia Minor over a five hundred year span (c. 1650-1180 B.C.). The vast majority of Hittite tablets were excavated from the ruins of the ancient Hittite capital Hattusa located near the modern Turkish town of Boghazkale (formerly Boghazköy) about 210 kilometers east of Ankara.

Scientific excavation of these ruins by a German expedition began in 1906. About 10,000 clay tablets inscribed with the familiar Assyro-Babylonian script were recovered at that moment. Although some were written in the Akkadian language and could be read immediately, most were in an unknown language, correctly assumed to be Hittite. Within ten years the language had been deciphered, and a sketch of its grammar published. Gradually, the interational community of scholars, led by the Germans, expanded the knowledge of the language. The number of common Hittite words that one could translate with reasonable certainty increased steadily. Glossaries published in 1936 by Edgar Sturtevant (in English) and in 1952 by Johannes Friedrich (in German) admirably served the needs of their contemporaries. Yet today, seventy-five years after the decipherment, there still exists no complete dictionary of the Hittite language.

The Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project (CHD) was officially started in 1975 with the awarding of an NEH grant to Harry A. Hoffner and Hans G. Güterbock, the editors. It was conceived in answer to a recognized need for a Hittite-English lexical tool, a concordance for lexicographical research for all parts of the corpus of Hittite texts.

Chicago Hittite Dictionary (CHD)


L-N, fascicles 1–4 xxx + 477 (1–477) 1989  
P, fascicles 1–3 xxxii + 403 1997  
Š, fascicle 1
(šā- to šaptamenzu)		 viii + 208 2002
 
Š, fascicle 2
(šaptamenzu to -ši-)		 209-332 2005  
Š, fascicle 3
(še to LÚšizišalla-)		 333-508 2013  

Chicago Hittite Dictionary Supplements (CHDS)

CHDS 1. Ankara Arkeoloji Müzesinde bulanan Bogazköy Tabletleri II - Bogazköy Tablets in the Archaeological Museum of Ankara II. By Rukiye Akdoğan and Oğuz Soysal. 2011.
CHDS 2. Unpublished Bo-Fragments in Transliteration I (Bo 9536 - Bo 9736). By Oğuz Soysal. 2015.
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Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Latin Language Stack Exchange

Latin Language Stack Exchange
Latin Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, teachers, and students wanting to discuss the finer points of the Latin language. Join them; it only takes a minute:
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Seleucid Coins Online News

Seleucid Coins Online is [mostly] complete and published
After a few months of continuous work on normalizing data and fixing some type numbering issues, Seleucid Coins Online has been updated and completed (with the exception of some typos or missing type/subtype records we might invariably find). There are now 2,519 total coin types from Seleucus I until late Roman Republican and early Augustan types issued with under the stated authority of Philip I (posthumously). There are about 6,000 subtypes nested hierarchically under these parent types, and more than 2,000 physical specimens from the ANS, Berlin, Muenster, Harvard Art Museums, and the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia have been linked to SCO, either at a higher parent type level (for worn coins) or at the specific subtype when an accurate identification can be made. Oliver Hoover is still working on cataloging later Seleucid coins in the ANS collection, so the coverage will be expanded in the near future.
Seleucid tetradrachms


Since the browse page is built logically around parent type numbers rather than the original version of SCO, which was not ordered hierarchically, the images displayed to the right of the descriptive summary include both parent and subtype specimens. As a result, the photographic coverage of parent types is enhanced. At present about 25% of all Seleucid types have at least one physical specimen (which is almost certainly photographed, since our NEH-funded Hellenistic Royal Coinages project has funding to catalog and photograph our entire Seleucid collection). To reiterate: we still have more cataloging work to do for the later Seleucid coinage. The photographic coverage can be derived from a SPARQL query of Nomisma.org. 

This project, along with PELLA and the impending Ptolemaic Coins Online, should prove to be a valuable resource for Hellenistic numismatics to students, scholars, general hobbyists, and archaeologists and museum professionals in aid of identifying and cataloging specimens from museums or excavations.
Geographic distribution of Seleucid coinage from East Greece to Ai Khanoum.

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Open Access Journal: Lithics – The Journal of the Lithic Studies Society

[First posted in AWOL 23 May 2011. Updated 30 October 2018 (New URLs)]

Lithics – The Journal of the Lithic Studies Society
ISSN: 0262-7817
stone tool logo
Lithics is the Lithic Studies Society’s annual, peer-reviewed journal (ISSN 0262-7817). It is devoted to publishing research which enhances our understanding of past societies through the study of stone tools. Published in the spring of each year, Lithics contains research articles, as well as shorter communications, book reviews, a bibliography of recent publications relevant to lithic studies, and news of the Society's related activities.








































































1980


No 1 (1980)












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Monday, October 29, 2018

Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries: A Guide for the Perplexed

Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries: A Guide for the Perplexed
/ October 1, 2018
Over the last three years I have worked more-or-less intensively and widely on Indo-European etymological problems as a research associate in Indo-European comparative linguistics on the Cognacy in Basic Lexicon project with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Over the course of this project I have had to check and revise hundreds and hundreds of etymologies from of historical and modern Indo-European languages, from Albanian to Welsh and nearly everything in between. (I’d say Albanian to Zazaki to have a nice Indo-European A–Z, but we don’t currently have Zaza data). While I hardly can be expected to be an expert on the historical grammar of every single Indo-European language (and I emphasise that we do consult with experts on individual branches and languages where necessary), as the main editor of the cross-branch Indo-European cognate judgements I do need to know where I can find reliable cognacy information on all the languages involved...
Part 2: Anatolian Etymological Dictionaries
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Newly added to Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis Online, 25-26 October 2018

Newly added to Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis Online. There are 292 volumes of this series now online open access.
Page Gasser, Madeleine (2001). Götter bewohnten Ägypten: Bronzefiguren der Sammlungen „Bibel+Orient“ der Universität Freiburg Schweiz. Freiburg, Switzerland / Göttingen, Germany: Universitätsverlag / Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Léonas, Alexis (2005). Recherches sur le langage de la Septante. Fribourg, Switzerland / Göttingen, Germany: Academic Press / Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Maussion, Marie (2003). Le mal, le bien et le jugement de Dieu dans le livre de Qohélet. Fribourg, Switzerland / Göttingen, Germany: Editions Universitaires / Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Reinmuth, Titus (2002). Der Bericht Nehemias: Zur literarischen Eigenart, traditionsgeschichtlichen Prägung und innerbiblischen Rezeption des Ich-Berichts Nehemias. Freiburg, Switzerland / Göttingen, Germany: Universitätsverlag / Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
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Sunday, October 28, 2018

Babylonian Calendar

The Babylonian Calendar
click for a larger image
The Babylonian calendar was a lunisolar calendar based on the lunar phases which was used in Babylon and surrounding regions for administrative, commercial and ritualistic purposes.
The Babylonian year consisted of twelve lunar months, each beginning on the evening (i.e. after sunset) of the first observed (or computed) lunar crescent after the astronomical new moon.
The year began around the spring equinox and in order to keep the calendar in step with the seasons, an intercalary month was inserted at (semi-)regular intervals. At first the intercalary months were inserted at irregular intervals, based on the observed discrepancies between the calendar and the seasons, but after about 500 BCE a regular intercalation scheme consisting of seven intercalary months in a 19-year cycle was adopted
This intercalation cycle was later also adopted by Greek astronomers, who referred to it as the Metonic cycle, and it still regulates the current Hebrew calendar.
This website supports a calendar converter for converting Babylonian dates into Julian dates, and vice-versa, and is based on the well-known calendrical tables in Babylonian Chronology by Richard Anthony Parker (1905-1993) and Waldo Herman Dubberstein (1907-1983) of which the most recent (4th) edition was published in 1971.
The calendar converter is valid between the year 626/25 BCE, the accession year of the Babylonian king Nabopolassar, and the year 75/76 CE [= 386 Seleucid Era = 322 Arsacid Era].
Introduction

The months of the Babylonian calendar

Babylonian calendar converter

Schematic dates for the equinoxes, the solstices and the heliacal phenomena of Sirius

Literature & web links
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Friday, October 26, 2018

ΛΟΓΕΙΟΝ - Logeion

 [First posted in AWOL 7 May 2012, updated 26 October 2018]

ΛΟΓΕΙΟΝ - Logeion
  • Update September 2018: Welcome to the beta release of Logeion 2, built by Philip Posner, Ethan Della Rocca and Josh Day. Enjoy! Do go for a ride on the inverse word wheel.
  • Logeion (literally, a place for words; in particular, a speaker's platform, or an archive) was developed after the example of dvlf.uchicago.edu, to provide simultaneous lookup of entries in the many reference works that make up the Perseus Classical collection. As always, we are grateful for the Perseus Project's generosity in sharing their data. None of this would be possible without their commitment to open access. To enhance this site as both a research and a pedagogical tool, we add information based on corpus data in the right side bar, as well as references to chapters in standard textbooks.
  • Update March 2017: We are delighted to announce the advent of two new resources. First of all, a team of scholar volunteers led by Gérard Gréco has worked to make Gaffiot's famous 1934 Dictionnaire Latin Français available in digital and updated form (including frequency data and updated standard citations for texts, among many other things), and we are delighted to incorporate this work, Gaffiot 2016, in Logeion. Many thanks to Gérard Gréco and also to Mark de Wilde for helping us to work out our formatting problems.
  • In addition, from Spain, we are delighted to add LMPG en línea, the digitized version of the lexicon for magic and religion in the Greek magical papyri originally published in 2001. Do visit the project's homepage to see the fuller array of functions available there. Many thanks, as always, to Prof. Somolinos and his team.
  • Update January 2016: We are delighted to announce the advent of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources in Logeion. Many thanks to the British Academy (specifically, its Projects committee and its DMLBS committee), and in particular to the editor of DMLBS, Richard Ashdowne, for making this happen. We are thrilled to add another newly-released resource on the Latin side. Academic users: please do urge your libraries to purchase print copies of DMLBS (and DGE!), if they have not yet done so.
  • Many thanks to Matt Shanahan, Josh Day, and XSLT wizard Alex Lee for their help in bringing DMLBS to Logeion.
  • The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources is the work of a century-long British Academy project, based first in London and then at the University of Oxford, that ran from 1913 to the completion of the printed dictionary in 2013. The DMLBS has been based wholly on original research and it documents the vocabulary of Latin in medieval Britain from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries. The DMLBS is a copyright work and the text appears on the Logeion site under licence from the British Academy, to whom we express our thanks. Users will find the following resources at the DMLBS project website helpful: A user's guide to the dictionary, the bibliography and notes to the bibliography, and guidelines for citing DMLBS.
  • Hellenists also have reason to rejoice: The Woordenboek Grieks/Nederlands, a Dutch project in progress, has made its finished letter ranges available to us. We thank the editors-in-chief, Ineke Sluiter, Albert Rijksbaron, and Ton Kessels, and their project coordinator, Lucien van Beek. A full roster of the team of writers and editors, and further information about the project, can be found on its website. At Logeion we believe that all users stand to benefit from up-to-date Greek dictionaries such as DGE and Grieks/Nederlands, regardless of their mother tongue. This is the first dictionary that Walt Shandruk has handled for Logeion; and while it takes skill to adapt third-party data, Walt has dealt with that but also confronted third-party code - with aplomb. Many thanks.
  • In other news, BWL, which is derived from a useful Dutch resource for intermediate Latin students, and illustrates important constructions and idiomatic usages of the most frequent Latin words, now features translations for its example sentences. This was a long-time desideratum, and we thank Rebekah Spearman for doing the last push that this project needed. She, however, cannot be held responsible for all the thousands of translated sentences! Please send your comments our way if you encounter problems. The other existing dictionaries, too, have seen the usual additional cleanup of infelicities in the original data entry process. Many thanks to all users who pointed out errors. If you find more, please report them: we are grateful for your assistance in incrementally improving this resource.
  • Update January 2015: We are grateful to Philip Peek of Bowling Green State University for making available his file with vocabulary for Chase & Phillips.
  • Update August 2014: In addition to the usual editing of existing dictionaries and morphology (keep reporting typos to us, please!), we are delighted to add a first author-specific lexicon on the Latin side, thanks to efforts at Dickinson College. Users will now encounter Frieze-Dennison's lexicon to Vergil's Aeneid for relevant entries. Many thanks to Christopher Francese and the DCC 'crew'! On another note, Logeion and the Logeion app got a mention in the New York Times, which we are thrilled about. We are, as always, grateful to Josh, Matt & Josh for developing this site and the app, and to the College of the University of Chicago for its support and its 'ambidextrous' undergrads, who know their way around Python and XML as well as around Greek and Latin.
  • Update December 2013: We are delighted to announce that we are adding the premier dictionary for Ancient Greek, the Diccionario Griego-Español (DGE), to Logeion. Both for entries from DGE and from DuCange, we will include a link to these dictionaries' home sites for every entry we display. As we work on displaying these entries better, we recommend (also) visiting the home sites, which look positively elegant. This update also brings the Latin-Dutch dictionary, LaNe, up to date with the printed 6th edition, which will be coming out soon.
  • Update October 2013: Logeion is now available as an app for iOS, so that you can consult it even without a working internet connection. Find the Logeion app in Apple's app store.
  • Update January 2012: We have now added a Latin-Dutch dictionary to the collection: The Woordenboek Latijn/Nederlands. One notable feature of this dictionary, for those who do not speak Dutch, is that a lot of attention has been paid to ensure accuracy of vowel length for the lexical entries. For further information see below.

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      Samothracian Networks

      Samothracian Networks
      Samothracian Networks

      Sailing an ancient sea

      In Samothrace Mariner, a study of ritual and mobility in the ancient world, we are building bridges between:
      • academic and scientific research, integrating theory and method from anthropology, geography, Classics, religion and ancient history
      • pedagogical needs, supporting instructors in primary and secondary education
      • gaming applications with broad potential for public education in the most informal of settings.
      These three approaches– research, pedagogy, and popular culture – are united through shared reliance on a unique database built on ancient sources. The core of the database comes from inscriptions, a form of historical data least accessible to the non-specialist.  These inscriptions have provided the geospatial and chronological parameters for a QGIS platform; to this we bring data from ancient history, poets, geographers and politicians, giving access to ancient voices located in the geospaces they occupied.
      Our interest at all three levels is maritime mobility: how did ancient travelers move safely through seas as full of risk as profit?  Highly developed sailing skills were one route; social contracts, often guaranteed by the gods, were another. These contracts, part of the Greek institution of proxenia, bound the parties to non-aggression, information sharing, and mutual support in ports of call. See “how it worked.”  They are recorded on inscriptions which provide dates, places, and the names of otherwise anonymous individuals charged with ensuring their city’s good behavior toward travelers and merchants from other cities around the Mediterranean world.
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      Thursday, October 25, 2018

      Mission Archélogique de Tell Dibgou

       [First posted in AWOL 10 October 2o015, updated 25 October 2018]

      Mission Archélogique de Tell Dibgou
      telldibgou
      Dibgou est l’un des sites les plus vastes et les mieux conservés du Nord-est du Delta du Nil.

      Il se situe sur les marges sud du Lac Menzaleh, à une dizaine de kilomètres au Nord-est du tell Sân el-Hagar, qui abrite les ruines de l’antique Tanis, capitale de l’Egypte au cours des XXIe et XXIIe dynasties.

      Le tell correspond aux ruines de l’ancienne ville de Dibgou. Constitué de couches de terrains stratifiés sur une grande épaisseur, il s’élève à 20 mètres au-dessus du niveau de la mer et s’étend sur une surface de près de 70 hectares.

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      Recent Open Access Dissertations on Antiquity in Knowledge@UChicago

      Recent Open Access Dissertations on Antiquity in Knowledge@UChicago

      Image result for Knowledge@UChicago
      Knowledge@UChicago preserves and shares the scholarly and creative assets of the University of Chicago's researchers, instructors, students, and staff. It is managed and supported by the Library and IT Services at the University of Chicago.
      Deciphering the Hidden Meaning: Scripture and the Hermeneutics of Liberation in Early Advaita Vedānta 
      Uskokov, Aleksandar (University of Chicago, 2018)
      Rethinking the Royal Ka 
      Winnerman, Jonathan (University of Chicago, 2018)
      The Poetics of Listening in Sophocles 
      Akavia, Abigail (University of Chicago, 2018)
      Between the Herms: Convention, Transition, and Intervention in Plato's Lysis 
      Crema, Michael Nicholas Gottardo (University of Chicago, 2018)
      The Amorite Dynasty of Ugarit: The Historical Origins of the Bronze Age Polity of Ugarit Based upon Linguistic, Literary, and Archaeological Evidence 
      Buck, Mary Ellen (University of Chicago, 2018)
      Processing Context-Sensitive Expressions: The Case of Gradable Adjectives and Numerals 
      Aparicio Terrasa, Helena (University of Chicago, 2017)
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      The Eton Greek Software Project

      The Eton Greek Software Project
      Eton College
      The Eton classics department has commissioned software to help with the learning of Greek vocabulary and grammar, making use of the new Oxford Greek Grammar by James Morwood. Oxford University Press has collaborated in this enterprise, and the Provost and Fellows of Eton College have made the programs available on the internet as a free service in accord with the college’s aims as a charitable organisation. The Reading Greek parts of the project have been developed in association with the Department of Classical Studies at the Open University. The Chandris Group has given generous support to the project.
      The software, which is designed by Tony Smith, is in self-contained and manageable stages. Several stages have now been completed and consist of four vocabulary testers (for AQA GCSE, OCR GCSE, OCR AS-level, and a Reading Greek vocabulary tester), three verb testers (for GCSE, AS-level, and a Reading Greek verb tester), four noun testers (for AQA GCSE, OCR GCSE, OCR AS-level, three adjective testers, and a Reading Greek noun tester), all of which can be accessed below. The responses are multiple-choice or written. There is also a downloadable word list suitable for use with the OCR AS-level. The next stage will be a syntax program consisting of ‘drag-and-drop’or ‘gap-filling’ exercises.
      Please click on the links below for the testers and the word list.
      The developers of the project would welcome your comments or suggestions. Please click here to send them an email.
      Accessing the testers on a tablet or mobile device

      The vocabulary and grammar testers won’t work in a standard web browser on an iOS or Android device as they are flash-based.  To use the testers on a tablet or mobile device, please follow these instructions:

      ·         Install the Puffin Academy app via iTunes or the Google Play store.
      ·         Launch the app and In the Puffin Academy app browser, search for ‘Eton Greek’
      ·         You can then click ‘Install’ to create a shortcut to the Eton Greek Project in Puffin Academy.
      ·         It will load this Eton College website page and the links to the testers should now work through the app.

      Note: Your school network administrator may have to whitelist the IP addresses used by the app – more information here.
      Accessing the testers on a Mac
      Note that the testers don’t work in the default Mac browser, Safari. Instead, we recommend using Google Chrome where they should load as normal. 
      In Google Chrome, you may also need to follow these instructions to enable Adobe Flash Player.
      Mac OS High Sierra – this version seems to affect Flash and means the above method might not work. If you have issues, this fix should work:

      1.    Open SAFARI (not Chrome, contrary to the instructions above)
      2.    Install Flash: https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ 
      3.    Close and reopen Safari
      4.    Go to Safari > Preferences
      5.    Click on the ‘Websites’ tab
      6.    Ensure Adobe Flash Player is enabled in the Plug-ins section
      7.     Click on Adobe Flash Player in the Plug-Ins column and ensure it is set to ‘On’ for etoncollege.com
      8.    Now try to click on one of the links in the Eton Greek page: http://www.etoncollege.com/GreekProject.aspx
      9.    You should get the popup window ‘Would you like to use Flash on etoncollege.com?” – Select ‘Use Every Time’
      10.   It should then work.
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      Wednesday, October 24, 2018

      Corpus of Arabic Legal Documents (CALD)

      Corpus of Arabic Legal Documents (CALD)
      Legal act
      Learn about these primary sources for Islamic law and legal practice in pre-modern Muslim societies. This online presentation is the first ever collection of scattered editions of legal documents from the 2nd/8th to the 9th/15th century, often with improved readings compared to earlier print versions. Documents are presented with the Arabic text in modern spelling and with full bibliographical data. 
      Browse the documents listed below by city or by library inventory number. 
      Search for any Arabic term. 
      Tools: after logging in, you can search for Arabic terms combined with document type, date and keywords. Images and/or URL links are provided where possible. 
      Credits: this online presentation was made possible by the ERC-financed FP 7 project ILM “Islamic Law Materialized” and by the concerted efforts of individuals from several institutions.


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