AWOL is 10!

6th January 2019 is the tenth anniversary of the launch of The Ancient World Online. In that time we have had 8,355,892 page views, and posted 6557 entries. 8,063 readers have chosen to receive the daily email update, with 1,783 followers on Facebook and 1937 followers on Twitter.

AWOL  is the successor to Abzu at ETANA, a multi-institutional collaborative project initiated in August 2000, as an electronic publishing project designed to enhance the study of the history and culture of the ancient Near East. Funded initially by a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, then by a larger digitization grant from the same foundation, the ETANA web portal was launched in 2001. That version is a successor to Abzu hosted at the website of the Oriental Institute Chicago  (the link is to the earliest version accessible at the Internet Archive), and was launched in October 1994, nearly twenty-five years ago. We believe it is the longest sustained effort to document and disseminate the development of online open access scholarship in any field.

The Ancient World Online is entirely non-commercial, uses only light-weight free and open tools for its management and distribution. Outside of the salaries I have received at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU, and the Libraries at Penn State University, AWOL and Abzu have required no financial support. AWOL is committed to open access and to providing access free of charge to scholarship on Antiquity to anyone who is interested.

Abzu was the winner of the Archaeological Institute of America's Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology Award in 2015, and the Digital Humanities Awards  2015  Best DH Blog Post or Series of Posts Award.


Thanks to you all for your continuing support, and please offer any feedback you may with to give. 

I wonder what this will loo like in another ten years let along twenty-five.