Official Inscriptions of the Middle East in Antiquity

Official Inscriptions of the Middle East in Antiquity

The LMU Munich-based and Humboldt Foundation-funded Official Inscriptions of the Middle East in Antiquity (OIMEA) is presently an umbrella project that is intended to facilitate quick and easy access to a wide range of open-access editions of ancient Middle Eastern texts, all of which at this time are hosted on the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc) platform. Some projects (see below) are directly or indirectly managed by members of the chair of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Historisches Seminar - Abteilung Alte Geschichte), Karen Radner -- in particular Alexa Bartelmus and Jamie Novotny -- while others are not and these are included here under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

As is obvious from the project's name, the scope of OIMEA is official inscriptions. The currently available projects -- all of whose texts are written in the Akkadian and Sumerian languages and in cuneiform -- are:

• Corpus of Kassite Sumerian Texts (CKST; University of California Berkeley)
• Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions (ETCSRI; Eötvös Loránd University Budapest)
• The Inscriptions of Suhu online (Suhu; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
• The Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online (RIAo; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
• The Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia online (RIBo; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
• The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period online (RINAPo; University of Pennsylvania [now in collaboration with Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München])

In time, OIMEA will include corpora of texts written in other languages, including Aramaic, Phoenician, Luwian, Old Persian, and Urartian. Moreover, the OIMEA team also intends to make the site a powerful multi-project search engine that will enable anyone interested in official inscriptions to simultaneously search the translations, transliterations, catalogues, and portal pages of every available project on which official inscriptions of the Middle East in Antiquity are edited. As an informational and search hub, the project strives to make the vast and varied corpus of inscriptions easily and freely accessible to every scholar, student, and member of the general public, and, in the near future, to enable our users the ability to effectively and efficiently search that rich genre of ancient records.