Old Assyrian Research Environment

Old Assyrian Research Environment

Welcome to a pre-release of OARE (/’ôrə/) at oare.byu.edu.

This website aims to offer published Old Assyrian texts for viewing and, eventually, analysis.

The intended purpose of the database is to facilitate work with the Old Assyrian texts from the period of Kültepe Level II and Kültepe Level Ib. OARE is organized to record textual and expert observations arising from the interpretation to facilitate collaborative research projects on the historical and archaeological record of the Old Assyrian trade and society through linguistic, lexical, economic, social, and other lenses.

At present transliterations, some translations, a signlist, and a basic bibliography are available here. An initial onomasticon, lexicon, gazetteer, and temporal period index are in preparation for release. Asset and transaction indexes are also planned.

The sidebar search on the left prefers abbreviations used within the Old Assyrian specialist community (thus TC 2 instead of TCL 14). It only uses commas with reference to page numbers (thus TC 2 1 instead of TC 2, 1). Consult the (i) buttons there and on the Search page to find further search features.

Please be advised that we are still working out issues. Use transliterations at your own risk. Many texts display nicely, but some display errors occasionally occur. In addition, we are still auditing the data. Original transliterations of text published before roughly 2008 arise from the Old Assyrian Text Project and a few other sources. Transliterations from more recent publications were checked within OARE/OCHRE, but some errors were introduced in converting to the format used for this database.

At present, a traffic light symbol in front of the name of the text displays the current status of the transliteration. The vast majority are ‘yellow’ meaning the transliteration has not yet been checked. Hovering over the traffic light icon will indicate what the displayed colors mean for the reliability of the transliteration.

If you are interested in participating in the project, please consider creating an account. The passwords chosen are not visible to us. We can share Beta features with interested registered users upon request and can make available further feedback mechanisms for development. Registered users can mark texts that are misbehaving, or point out errors. Anyone is invited to please send any feedback to oarefeedback@byu.edu.