Friday, January 22, 2021

Datenbank sumerischer Streitliteratur

Datenbank sumerischer Streitliteratur

The "Datenbank der sumerischen Streitliteratur" (DSSt) groups together 15 Sumerian literary texts from the Old Babylonian period as disputation literature. In these texts two rulers, students, women, or abstractions from everyday life compete in a verbal contest, aiming to outdo their opponent in rhetoric. At the end of the contest a higher authority, such as a deity or teacher, chooses the winner. Moreover, five Edubba'a texts and five Diatribes were added to the corpus. These are crucial for understanding the disputation literature, because their vocabulary resembles that of the disputations.

DSSt aims for the edition of these 25 literary works in the form of a score text together with a composite and translation in English, French or German. The project (no. PP00P1_150483) was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation between 2014 and 2018 and could benefit from several partnerships. As work on the project continues, the completion of the database is planned on the medium term (see Corpus).

Warm thanks go to all project associates, who contributed considerably to the success of the database (see Staff). I would like to mention especially Jana Matuszak and Pascal Attinger who generously shared all their material with us, Niek Veldhuis for his patient and efficient support over five years and Steve Tinney for his offer to lemmatize the DSSt corpus. Work on the disputation literature would not have been possible without the pioneering research of Miguel Civil and his precious catalogues and text reconstructions.

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