src/about/ui/fragmentarium.tsx
import React from 'react'
import { Markdown, MarkdownParagraph } from 'common/Markdown'
import Markup from 'markup/ui/markup'
import MarkupService from 'markup/application/MarkupService'
import bezold from 'about/ui/static/bezold.jpg'
import borgerlambert from 'about/ui/static/borgerlambert.jpg'
import creativecommonslicense from 'about/ui/static/creativecommonslicense.png'
import finkeljoins from 'about/ui/static/finkeljoins.jpg'
import fragmentstorevise from 'about/ui/static/fragmentstorevise.jpg'
import geers from 'about/ui/static/geers.jpg'
import georgetransliteration from 'about/ui/static/georgetransliteration.jpg'
import kerslakebm from 'about/ui/static/kerslakebm.jpg'
import lambert from 'about/ui/static/lambert.jpg'
import leichty from 'about/ui/static/leichty.jpg'
import mayertransliteration from 'about/ui/static/mayertransliteration.jpg'
import reinernotebooks from 'about/ui/static/reinernotebooks.jpg'
import parpola from 'about/ui/static/parpola.png'
import shaffer from 'about/ui/static/shaffer.jpg'
import smithdt1 from 'about/ui/static/smithdt1.jpg'
import strassmaier from 'about/ui/static/strassmaier.jpg'
import strassmaiercopies from 'about/ui/static/strassmaiercopies.jpg'
export default function AboutFragmentarium(
markupService: MarkupService
): JSX.Element {
function MarkupParagraph({ text }: { text: string }): JSX.Element {
return (
<p>
<Markup markupService={markupService} text={text} />
</p>
)
}
return (
<>
<MarkupParagraph
text="In 1850, in the ruins of the South-West Palace at Nineveh (modern Mosul), in
two rooms flanked by colossal reliefs of sages, the pioneer archaeologist
Austen H. Layard found thousands of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform
script “broken into many fragments,” completely covering the floors. He
anticipated that “years must elapse before the innumerable fragments can be put
together and the inscriptions transcribed for the use of those who in England
and elsewhere may engage in the study of the cuneiform character”
(@bib{RN2710@347}). After nearly 180 years the task envisioned by Layard is,
despite the efforts of generations of cuneiform specialists, still far from
finished. Bluntly put, there are still many fragments without texts and many
texts without fragments."
/>
<MarkupParagraph
text="The existence of a large mass of fragments vaguely described in museum
catalogues by broad categories such as “religious,” “literary,” or “hymnic” has
been a problem for cuneiformists since the inception of the field. The
knowledge that there are many fragments “literally crying out for more joins”
(@bib{RN2717@126}) haunts cuneiformists in their daily work. The goal of the
Fragmentarium is to provide a lasting solution for the abiding problem of the
fragmentariness of Babylonian literature. Thousands of fragments have been
identified by members of the eBL project, and around 1,200 joins have been
discovered, but many more remain to be found. By compiling transliterations of
all fragments in museums’ cabinets, and enabling them to be searched in
different, dynamic ways, it is hoped that cuneiform scholars will identify them
and be able to use them. The Fragmentarium will eventually include fragments of
Sumerian and Akkadian texts of all genres and periods, although presently
special attention is paid to fragments of first-millennium non-administrative
tablets, written in both Akkadian and Sumerian."
/>
<h3>I. How to Cite</h3>
<MarkdownParagraph
text="The editions contained in the Fragmentarium are mostly of a
preliminary nature, and are intended to provide a research tool to aid
in the reconstruction of Babylonian literature, rather than a
finished, polished product. They are constantly updated, and will
continue to be so for the foreseeable future."
/>
<MarkdownParagraph text="In order to cite a certain edition, the following style is recommended:" />
<p className="Introduction__cite">
<Markdown
text="K.5743, eBL edition
(https://www.ebl.lmu.de/fragmentarium/K.5743),
accessed"
/>{' '}
{new Date().toLocaleDateString() + ''}{' '}
</p>
<MarkdownParagraph
text="The editions in the Fragmentarium are published under a [Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which
allows the non-commercial redistribution of material as long as
appropriate credit is given."
/>
<p className="Introduction__creativeCommonsLicense">
<a
rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"
>
<img alt="Creative Commons License" src={creativecommonslicense} />
</a>
</p>
<h3>II. Sources of the Catalogue</h3>
<MarkupParagraph
text="The initial catalogue of the Fragmentarium was compiled using the catalogue of
@url{https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection}{The British Museum digital collections},
the catalogue of the @url{https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/}{Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative},
the catalogue of the
@url{https://collections.peabody.yale.edu/search/Search/Results?lookfor=bc+babylonian+collection&limit=5&sort=title}{Yale Babylonian Collection}
and numerous other published and unpublished catalogues. Particularly useful was R. Borger’s
catalogue of the Kuyunjik collection (@bib{BorgerKat}), to which he referred
frequently in his later publications (@bib{RN680@vii}; see
@bib{maul2011rykle@167}), but which was never finished. The version published
in the Fragmentarium was kindly made available by J. Taylor."
/>
<p>
The list of joins has been compiled on the basis of the catalogue of the
British Museum, kindly made available by J. Taylor. This catalogue has
been supplemented by several join books of the British Museum (currently
the join books covering September 1983 to August 1987 and April 1999 to
March 2019 have been integrated into the database). In addition, a list
of joins of tablets in the Penn Museum as been compiled by J. Peterson
on behalf of the eBL project.
</p>
<p>
These initial sources have been thoroughly corrected and supplemented by
the eBL project’s staff.
</p>
<h3>III. Photographs</h3>
<p>
The photographs of tablets from The British Museum’s Kuyunjik collection
were produced in 2009-2013, as part of the on-going “Ashurbanipal
Library Project” (2002–present), thanks to funding provided by The
Townley Group and The Andrew Mellon Foundation. The photographs were
produced by Marieka Arksey, Kristin A. Phelps, Sarah Readings, and Ana
Tam; with the assistance of Alberto Giannese, Gina Konstantopoulos,
Chiara Salvador, and Mathilde Touillon-Ricci. They are displayed on the
eBL website courtesy of Dr. Jon Taylor, director of the “Ashurbanipal
Library Project.”
</p>
<p>
<figure className="Introduction__photoLeft">
<img
className="Introduction__400px"
src={kerslakebm}
alt="I. Kerslake in the British Museum"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
I. Kerslake photographs tablets in the British Museum, 2019
</figcaption>
</figure>
The photographs of the The British Museum’s Babylon collection are taken
by Alberto Giannese and Ivor Kerslake (2019–present) in the framework of
the “electronic Babylonian Literature” project, funded by a Sofia
Kovalevskaja Award (Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung).
</p>
<p>
The photographs of the tablets in the Iraq Museum have been produced by
Anmar A. Fadhil (University of Baghdad – eBL Project), and displayed by
permission of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage and The Iraq
Museum.
</p>
<p>
The photographs of the tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection are
being produced by Klaus Wagensonner (Yale University), and used with the
kind permission of the Agnete W. Lassen (Associate Curator of the Yale
Babylonian Collection, Yale Peabody Museum).
</p>
<p>
The images cannot be reproduced without the explicit consent of the
funding projects and institutions, as well as the institutions in which
the cuneiform tablets are kept. Users are referred to the conditions for
reproducing the images in the links shown in the captions under the
images.
</p>
<h3>IV. Editions in the Fragmentarium</h3>
<p>
<figure className="Introduction__photoRight">
<img
className="Introduction__250px"
src={fragmentstorevise}
alt="List of fragments to revise"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
List of texts to revise, eBL team
</figcaption>
</figure>
The editions in the Fragmentarium have been produced by the entire eBL
Team, starting in 2018. Thousands of them were produced on the basis of
photographs and have not been collated in the museum. Although the speed
at which fragments have been transliterated has been necessarily fast,
the quality control measurements adopted, and in particular the policy
to have each edition revised by a scholar different from the original
editor, means that they are normally reliable. Each member of the team
has produced some 40 editions and revised some 60 editions a month on
average.
</p>
<p>
In addition, the{' '}
<a href="https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/babmed/index.html">
BabMed team
</a>{' '}
has kindly made acessible its large collections of transliterations of
Mesopotamian medicine for their use on the Fragmentarium. They have been
imported by the eBL team using the importer developed by T. Englmeier
(see{' '}
<a href="https://github.com/ElectronicBabylonianLiterature/generic-documentation/wiki/eBL-ATF-and-other-ATF-flavors">
here
</a>{' '}
and{' '}
<a href="https://github.com/ElectronicBabylonianLiterature/ebl-api#importing-atf-files">
here
</a>
), and thoroughly revised and lemmatized chiefly by H. Stadhouders. The
transliterations of the BabMed team were originally produced by Markham
J. Geller, J. Cale Johnson, Ulrike Steinert, Stravil V. Panayotov, Eric
Schmidtchen, Krisztián Simkó, Marius Hoppe, Marie Lorenz, John
Schlesinger, Till Kappus, and Agnes Kloocke (at FU Berlin), as well as
Annie Attia, Sona Eypper, and Henry Stadhouders (as external
collaborators).
</p>
<h3>V. Folios</h3>
<p>
The electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL) project, and in particular
its Fragmentarium, continues the efforts of generations of
Assyriologists to rescue the literature of Ancient Mesopotamia from the
hands of oblivion. The Fragmentarium stands on the shoulders of previous
scholars, and has used extensively their unpublished, unfinished work,
for compiling its database of transliterations. It is a pleasure to
acknowledge our gratitude to the following scholars:
</p>
<h4>V.1. George Smith (26 March 1840 – 19 August 1876)</h4>
<MarkupParagraph
text="The pioneering Assyriologist George Smith became famous in 1872 for his
discovery of a Babylonian version of the Flood story. Subsequently he led an
expedition to Mesopotamia to excavate in Nineveh in 1874–1875, and his findings
form the base of the British Museum’s Sm and DT collections. In his notebooks
he carefully copied the tablets found during his excavations, as well as many
other tablets he was able to examine in The British Museum. Interestingly,
Smith’s copies often display the tablets in a better shape than their current
state (see @bib{RN117@412–414 and 885} and @bib{RN2877})."
/>
<figure className="Introduction__photoLeft">
<img
className="Introduction__400px"
src={smithdt1}
alt="G. Smith’s draft copy of DT.1"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
G. Smith’s draft copy of DT.1
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
In one of his last diaries, dated August 1876, George Smith states: “I
intended to work it out but desire now that my antiquities and notes may
be thrown open to all students[.] I have done my duty thoroughly” (Add
MS 30425 f. 28a). Smith’s notebooks are kept at the British Library; a
provisional catalogue of them was prepared by E. Jiménez. All notebooks
containing copies of cuneiform tablets (VII, XI, XII, XIV, and XVII)
have been digitized with funds provided by a Sofia Kovalevskaja Award
(Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung). The tablets were copied by Smith
before they were given museum numbers, so their identification is often
challenging. Those that could be identified are displayed in the
Fragmentarium, e.g. <a href="/fragmentarium/DT.1">DT.1</a>.
</p>
<h4>V.2. Johann Strassmaier, S.J. (15 May 1846 – 11 January 1920)</h4>
<figure className="Introduction__photoRight">
<img
className="Introduction__250px"
src={strassmaier}
alt="Johann Strassmaier, S.J. (courtesy of W. R. Mayer)"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
Johann Strassmaier, S.J. (courtesy of W. R. Mayer)
</figcaption>
</figure>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Johann Strassmaier, S.J., was a scholar “convinced that it was a waste of time
to compile an Assyrian Dictionary, or to write a history of the Sumerian and
Babylonian civilizations, whilst so many tens of thousands of tablets in the
British Museum and elsewhere remained unpublished; and he determined to devote
himself to copying texts and publishing new material.”
(@bib{wallisbudge1925rise@228}). For that reason, “for about twenty years
Strassmaier copied tablets daily in the Museum from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and he
must have copied half the Collection.” (@bib{wallisbudge1925rise@229}). He
copied in a systematic way a large number of tablets from The British Museum’s
“Babylon Collection,” with a particular emphasis on economic documents and
astrological/astronomical material."
/>
<figure className="Introduction__photoLeft">
<img
className="Introduction__300px"
src={strassmaiercopies}
alt="Collection of Strassmaier’s copies at the Pontifical Biblical Institute"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
Collection of Strassmaier’s copies at the Pontifical Biblical
Institute
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
The two collections of Strassmaier’s copies (I and II) were reunited in
the Pontifical Biblical Institute by W. R. Mayer in the early 1980s,
combining what J. Schaumberger had left to the Biblicum after his death
in 1955 with portions of the collections kept in Gars am Inn and in The
British Museum. Two different catalogues of the copies were prepared by
Mayer, who also collated a large number of the tablets in the British
Museum. The collections were digitized in the Pontifical Biblical
Institute in 2019, courtesy of W. R. Mayer and of its Rector M. F.
Kolarcik.
</p>
<h4>V.3. Carl Bezold (18 May 1859 – 21 November 1922)</h4>
<figure className="Introduction__photoRight">
<img
className="Introduction__200px"
src={bezold}
alt="Carte de visite of Bezold at the British Museum (courtesy J. Taylor)"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
Carte de visite of Bezold at the British Museum (courtesy J. Taylor)
</figcaption>
</figure>
<MarkdownParagraph
text="Carl Bezold, Professor of Assyriology in Heidelberg, completed at the
end of the 19th century the daunting task of cataloguing all fragments
of the Kuyunjik collection. His magnum opus
*Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum*,
published between 1889 and 1899, has been the foundation of all
research on the Library of Assurbanipal since its publication, and is
still today useful. As preparation for that work, Bezold inscribed
thousands of pages, sometimes with simple stenographic notes with
general information, sometimes with full copies of the fragments he
catalogued."
/>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Around 1,000 copies from Bezold’s Nachlass are now kept in the Heidelberg
Universitätsbibliothek. They were kindly digitized at the request of the
electronic Babylonian Literature project in 2018, thanks to the help of Clemens
Rohfleisch. The copies and notes were catalogued by the electronic Babylonian
Literature staff. The Nachlass Bezold, which had previously been almost
entirely inaccessible to research (@bib{RN51@43–44}), is now made available on
the eBL website."
/>
<h4>V.4. Friedrich W. Geers (24 January 1885 – 29 January 1955)</h4>
<figure className="Introduction__photoLeft">
<img
className="Introduction__400px"
src={geers}
alt="Collection of Geers’s copies once at the Oriental Institute"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
Collection of Geers’s copies once at the Oriental Institute
</figcaption>
</figure>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Friedrich W. Geers was “a quiet man, of a shy and retiring nature, who always
strove to keep his lonely private life and his personal attitudes hidden under
a cloak of friendly silence” (@bib{RN3229}). From 1924 until the break of the
Second World War, Geers regularly visited the Students’ Room of the British
Museum in order to copy, more or less systematically, the tablets mentioned in
Bezold’s @i{Catalogue}. He spent a great deal of his career studying his copies
and was able to identify innumerable fragments, but published very few of them.
His notebooks of transliterations, which were photographed and reproduced
during his lifetime, have been so widely used by scholars and in such a
profitable manner that a memorial volume was dedicated to Geers no fewer than
twenty years after his life by the most renowned scholars of the time. The
“harmlose Geers,” as Landsberger calls him (@bib{RN2045@1257}), single-handedly
copied over 7,000 tablets and fragments of Ashurbanipal’s libraries and
demonstrates in his copies a profound knowledge of the Mesopotamian literature
and an unmatched expertise with the first-hand study of cuneiform sources."
/>
<p>
Geers’ copies have been digitized from the copy once in the Oriental
Institute of The University of Chicago, kindly donated by Prof. Martha
T. Roth to the Institut für Assyriologie und Hethitologie of Munich
University.
</p>
<h4>V.5. Hugo Heinrich Figulla (27 December 1885 – 6 February 1969)</h4>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Hugo Heinrich Max Figulla was born in Loslau (today Wodzisław Śląski) in Silesia.
He began his university studies in Berlin and became a student of Bruno Meissner
in Breslau (today Wrocław). During his long career, Figulla published hundreds
of Neo-Babylonian letters, Old Babylonian and Neo-Babylonian legal and
administrative documents (from Woolley’s excavations at Ur, among others) and
Hittite texts in collections in Berlin, Constantinople and London.
After having left Germany, he took up the task of cataloguing the vast
Babylonian Collections of the British Museum. Up to then, the non-Assyrian
tablets of the museum had received less attention than the Kuyunjik Collection
catalogued by Carl Bezold and Leonard W. King. Figulla published a first volume
on BM 12230–BM 15230 in 1961, a Sisyphean task according to one of the reviewers
(@bib{Krecher1967Figulla@311}).
In the course of his work, which was certainly laborious but by no means futile,
Figulla prepared hundreds of preliminary transliterations and hand copies; these
reveal his knowledge of not only the periods covered by his previous publications
but also of the Ur III administration.
Figulla’s notebooks were digitized by Manuel Molina."
/>
<h4>V.6. Erica Reiner (4 August 1924 – 31 December 2005)</h4>
<figure className="Introduction__photoRight">
<img
className="Introduction__300px"
src={reinernotebooks}
alt="Notebooks by E. Reiner"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
Notebooks by E. Reiner
</figcaption>
</figure>
<MarkdownParagraph
text="Erica Reiner was a Hungarian-American Assyriologist, one of the main
forces behind the epoch-making
*The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago*.
During her long and productive career, Reiner was the world’s foremost
expert in Mesopotamian celestial divination, a field in which she
produced several fundamental studies, such as the series of monographs
*Babylonian Planetary Omens* (with D. Pingree)."
/>
<MarkupParagraph
text="In her mid-70s, Reiner produced a catalogue of all celestial omen tablets in
the British Museum known to her (@bib{RN2030}). The basis for that catalogue
was her extensive collection of transliterations and notes, made in the course
of many years of study, correspondence with colleagues, and visits to the
Students’ Room. Reiner’s collection, bequeathed to Hermann Hunger, was donated
by the latter to the Institut für Assyriologie und Hethitologie of Munich
University, and is made available here with Hunger’s kind permission."
/>
<h4>V.7. W. G. Lambert (26 February 1926 – 9 November 2011)</h4>
<MarkupParagraph
text="W. G. Lambert “made a greater contribution to the continuing task of recovering
and understanding Babylonian literature than any other member of his
generation” (@bib{RN3226@337}). Author of the influential monographs
@i{Babylonian Wisdom Literature} and @i{Babylonian Creation Myths}, Lambert was
the leading expert in Babylonian literature for over fifty years. In his
several books and dozens of articles, Lambert reconstructed an astonishing
number of previously unknown texts, setting high philological standards for the
field. The thousands of fragments that he assessed in his pursuit were
carefully transliterated in his collection notebooks, which represent the
fruits of over fifty years of painstaking labor. Lambert granted access to his
notebooks to several scholars throughout his life. R. Borger was able to use
this “ungeheuer reichhaltige Material” (@bib{RN1445@viii}) for the compilation
of the second band of his @i{Handbuch der Keilschriftliteratur}
(@bib{RN1445@1975}). This collection of notebooks, catalogued and digitized by
Lambert’s academic executor, A. R. George, and used here with his permission,
forms the core of the Fragmentarium."
/>
<figure className="Introduction__photoLeft">
<img
className="Introduction__200px"
src={lambert}
alt="W. G. Lambert in Wassenaar, 1990 (courtesy U. Kasten)"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
W. G. Lambert in Wassenaar, 1990 (courtesy U. Kasten)
</figcaption>
</figure>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Another source of transliterations is Lambert’s notebook of divinatory texts.
The @i{Chicago Assyrian Dictionary} requested from Lambert a standard edition
of the vast divinatory treatise @i{Šumma Ālu}, “If a City,” in order for the
Chicago lexicographers to excerpt it for their work (@bib{RN3226@344}). In
preparation for that edition, Lambert undertook the colossal task of
transliterating all known manuscripts of the treatise and related texts, both
published an unpublished. Lambert shared his “Heft mit Omentexten”
(@bib{RN1445@viii}) with several scholars around the world: the copy used in
the Fragmentarium was, in fact, found among Leichty’s papers."
/>
<MarkupParagraph
text="In addition, a large assemblage of small fragments from the British Museum’s
Kuyunjik collection was discovered by J. E. Reade and C. B. F. Walker in the
1970s (@bib{RN51@44–45}). Lambert was commissioned with cataloguing these “high
K-numbers,” a total of 5,500 small fragments from the libraries of Ashurbanipal
(@bib{RN684}). Lambert prepared meticulous transliterations of each of these
tablets (K 16801 – K 22202), and passed them on to colleagues specializing in
different areas. This vast collection of transliterations, prepared between
1976 and 1990s, is now kept in its entirety in the British Museum, and is made
accessible here courtesy of A. R. George and of Jon Taylor (Assistant Keeper of
the Cuneiform Collections of the British Museum)."
/>
<h4>V.8. Riekele Borger (24 May 1929 – 27 December 2010)</h4>
<figure className="Introduction__photoRight">
<img
className="Introduction__350px"
src={borgerlambert}
alt="R. Borger and W. G. Lambert in the British Museum (courtesy J. Taylor)"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
R. Borger and W. G. Lambert in the British Museum (courtesy J. Taylor)
</figcaption>
</figure>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Riekele Borger, professor of Assyriology in Göttingen, was one of the most
prominent Assyriologists in the 20th century. His monumental reference works
(@i{Handbuch der Keilschriftliteratur} and @i{Mesopotamisches Zeichenlexikon},
among others) are a testimony to Borger’s life-long interest in providing
Assyriology with the bibliographical, lexicographical, and epigraphical
foundations he so sorely missed during his studies, a time he referred to as
the “düstere handbuchlose Zeitalter der Assyriologie” (@bib{RN680@v}). Two
additional unfinished monumental works by Borger, the @i{Sumerisches
Handwörterbuch hauptsächlich aufgrund der Bilinguen} and his @i{Katalog der
Kuyunjik-Sammlung}, are published posthumously on the website of the electronic
Babylonian Literature project."
/>
<MarkdownParagraph
text="Borger’s transliterations of Kuyunjik tablets were made in the course of three
visits to the British Museum between 2006 and 2010, in the framework of The
British Museum’s Ashurbanipal Library Project. The goal was to complete his
catalogue of the Kuyunjik collection, a project sadly thwarted by his death in
2010. The transliterations were digitized by the eBL project in 2020, with the
kind permission of Angelika Borger, and thanks to the support of Prof. A. Zgoll
(Göttingen)."
/>
<h4>V.9. Aaron Shaffer (2 January 1933 – 5 April 2004)</h4>
<figure className="Introduction__photoLeft">
<img
className="Introduction__250px"
src={shaffer}
alt="Aaron Shaffer in Chicago (courtesy N. Wasserman)"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
Aaron Shaffer working in Chicago (courtesy N. Wasserman)
</figcaption>
</figure>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Aaron Shaffer was professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Educated at
the University of Toronto and the University of Pennsylvania, Shaffer wrote his
dissertation on the Sumerian sources of the Epic of Gilgamesh
(@bib{shaffer1963sumerian}), two topics – the Sumerian language’s relationship
to Akkadian and the Epic of Gilgamesh – which he pursued throughout his life.
At the Hebrew University, he pioneered the use of computers by creating a
database of Sumerian literary and lexical texts
(@bib{WassermanObitShaffer@339}). Over more than three decades Shaffer visited
the British Museum every year and prepared copies of Sumerian and Akkadian
literary texts. His work, which focused mostly on the Old Babylonian literary
texts from Ur, resulted in the posthumous publication of @i{Ur Excavations
Texts VI: Literary and Religious Texts, Third Part} in 2006 (@bib{UET_6_3})."
/>
<p>
Shaffer’s large collection of photographs, many of them of Ur tablets,
are in the possession of Nathan Wasserman, who has catalogued and
digitized them and generously shared them with the eBL.
</p>
<h4>V.10. Erle V. Leichty (7 August 1933 – 19 September 2016)</h4>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Erle Leichty reached international fame when, as a 25-year old graduate student
at the University of Chicago, discovered the then missing beginning of the
Babylonian @i{Poem of the Righteous Sufferer} (@bib{RN3228}). His dissertation,
a pioneering edition of the teratomantic series “If an Anomaly” (@i{Šumma
Izbu}, @bib{RN839}) marked the beginning of his life-long interest on the
divinatory treatises of Ancient Mesopotamia. He and his students set out to
reconstruct some of the largest Mesopotamian series, and to that end he amassed
a collection of thousands of transliterations, chiefly of tablets from the
libraries of King Ashurbanipal (668–631 BCE). Throughout his life, he
generously made these transliterations available to students and colleagues,
who often expressed their gratitude in the prologues of books and articles."
/>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Erle Leichty spent most summers of his career in London (@bib{RN3227}), where
he painstakingly prepared catalogues of the vast “Sippar Collection” of the
British Museum, consisting of over 40,000 tablets. Published in Leichty 1986,
Leichty/Grayson 1987, and Leichty/Finkelstein/Walker 1988, the catalogues made
the invaluable wealth of these collections, until then largely inaccessible,
fully available to researchers. While preparing the catalogues, Leichty
transliterated hundreds of tablets, focusing on divinatory texts and on
Neo-Babylonian administrative documents, in notebooks and loose pages of paper."
/>
<figure className="Introduction__photoLeft">
<img
className="Introduction__400px"
src={leichty}
alt="E. Leichty’s note on notebook NB 911"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
E. Leichty’s note on notebook NB 911
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
Leichty must have imagined that his notebooks would one day be used for
the digital reconstruction of cuneiform literature, since in one of his
notebooks he writes: “many r[igh]t sides of omens too fragmentary to
identify but might be good for computer search” (EL NB 911, see the
adjoining image).
</p>
<p>
The transliterations of Erle Leichty are used here with the generous
permission of Steve Tinney, Associate Curator of the Babylonian Section
(Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology). Thanks are expressed to
Phil Jones and his team, who were responsible for the scanning of part
of them.
</p>
<h4>V.11. Stephen J. Lieberman (1943 – 1992)</h4>
<MarkdownParagraph
text="Stephen J. Lieberman was Research Associate at the Sumerian Dictionary Project
of the University of Pennsylvania from 1981 until his untimely death in 1992.
In this decade, Lieberman amassed a large photographic collection, numbering
well over 4,000 photographs of tablets in the British Museum, the University of
Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Frau Professor
Hilprecht Collection of Babylonian Antiquities, and the Istanbul Archaeology
Museums, among others. The collection of photographs comprises mostly lexical
material, most of it published as part of *Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon*
series."
/>
<MarkdownParagraph
text="Lieberman’s photographs, kept in the Babylonian Section of the University of
Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, were kindly shared by
Prof. Niek Veldhuis, and are visible to registered users."
/>
<h4>V.12. A. Kirk Grayson</h4>
<MarkupParagraph
text="A. Kirk Grayson wrote, under the supervision of W. G. Lambert, his doctoral
thesis on the chronicles of ancient Mesopotamia, a book that was to become a
field standard, hitherto unreplaced (@bib{RN258}). His interest on historical
texts reached its zenith when, in the late 1970s, he initiated the project
@i{The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Project} (RIM), one of the most
successful projects in the field. Its goal is to produce up-to-date, reliable
editions of all royal inscriptions from ancient Mesopotamia, a fabulous task
that required the collection of thousands of scattered sources and their study
in world’s museums. The RIM project, now continued by the
@url{http://oracc.org/rinap/abouttheproject/index.html}{RINAP}, is perhaps the
“crowning achievement” of Grayson’s prolific career (so Sweet 2004: xxvi).
Grayson, who is himself the author or co-author of no fewer than five of the
RIM series’ volumes, spent a great deal of his time working with cuneiform
tablets at museums, and was indeed co-responsible for the publication of one of
the “Sippar Collection”’s catalogues, together with E. Leichty (@bib{RN1797}).
His meticulous draft transliterations, used here courtesy of J. Novotny, are a
testimony to the rare combination of philological competence and historical
erudition of A. K. Grayson."
/>
<h4>V.13. Werner R. Mayer, S.J.</h4>
<figure className="Introduction__photoRight">
<img
className="Introduction__400px"
src={mayertransliteration}
alt="Transliteration by W. R. Mayer"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
Transliteration by W. R. Mayer
</figcaption>
</figure>
<MarkdownParagraph
text="Werner R. Mayer is an Assyriologist specializing in Akkadian grammar and
literature from the first millennium BCE. Mayer’s work combines in an
unparalleled manner philological rigor and literary inventiveness, a rare
conjunction that has led to many far-reaching lexical and grammatical
discoveries. Mayer has also worked extensively on the reconstruction of
first-millennium devotional poetry, both on the basis of the Strassmaier’s
folios (s. above), and in the course of numerous visits to the British Museum.
Mayer has generously made available his large collection of accurate
transliterations of literary texts for use in the Fragmentarium."
/>
<h4>V.14. Markham J. Geller</h4>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Markham J. Geller is a renowned specialist in ancient Mesopotamian medicine and
magic, as well as in Jewish and Late Antique science. He is widely recognized
for his extensive studies on Mesopotamian medicine, its place in Ancient Near
Eastern to Late Antique contexts, and his groundbreaking work in the field of
Mesopotamian magic. He is the author of the monumental edition of the
@i{Canonical Udug-hul Incantations} (@bib{RN2547}), which reflects his
decades-long research in the area. The
@url{https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/babmed/}{BabMed – Babylonian Medicine
project}, led by Geller (2013–2018), has made a significant contribution to the
field by providing annotated editions of almost all known Mesopotamian medical
texts and making ancient Mesopotamian medicine accessible to a wider audience.
M. J. Geller has generously ceded to the eBL project thousands of pages of
transliterations, prepared in the course of decades of work in the British
Museum, which have greatly improved the basis of medical, magical, ritual, and
bilingual texts in the Fragmentarium."
/>
<h4>V.15. Simo Parpola</h4>
<figure className="Introduction__photoLeft">
<img
className="Introduction__300px"
src={parpola}
alt="Parpola’s transliteration and identification of Rm.468"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
Parpola’s transliteration and identification of{' '}
<a href="/fragmentarium/Rm.468">Rm.468</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<MarkdownParagraph
text="The Finnish Assyriologist Simo Parpola is the founder and leader of the
[*State Archives of Assyria*](https://assyriologia.fi/natcp/saa/) project, perhaps the
most influential, field-defining
project in the history of the discipline. With unrivalled erudition and inexhaustible
energy, Parpola and his team have reconstructed and published almost all first-millennium
Assyrian administrative texts, and made them accessible in the prestigious *SAA* series
and multiple subseries. Parpola was a pioneer in the use of computers for cuneiform
philology, and the technologies developed by him at the beginning of the *SAA* project
are still in use today. In the course of his reconstruction of the archives of the
Assyrian empire, Parpola transliterated and identified dozens of tablets in the British
Museum. Parpola has kindly digitized his transliterations and made them available for
their use in the Fragmentarium."
/>
<h4>V.16. Irving L. Finkel</h4>
<figure className="Introduction__photoRight">
<img
className="Introduction__400px"
src={finkeljoins}
alt="List of “joins” in a notebook by I. L. Finkel"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
List of “joins” in a notebook by I. L. Finkel
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
Irving L. Finkel is a leading authority in the field of Mesopotamian
scholarship, whose areas of expertise encompass a wide range of
subjects, from astronomical diaries to ancient board games. Finkel has
served as an Assistant Keeper at the British Museum’s Department of the
Middle East for many years. Finkel’s many significant contributions to
Assyriology stem from his discoveries of valuable tablets and fragments
in the museum’s collection, with which he is uniquely acquainted. The
decades of meticulous work Finkel has devoted to Assyriology are evident
in his notebooks, which include lists of “joins” discovered by him, as
well as careful, accurate transliterations of hundreds of medical and
magical texts.
</p>
<h4>V.17. Andrew R. George</h4>
<figure className="Introduction__photoLeft">
<img
className="Introduction__300px"
src={georgetransliteration}
alt="Transliteration by A. R. George"
/>
<figcaption className="Introduction__caption">
Transliteration by A. R. George
</figcaption>
</figure>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Andrew R. George is a highly respected Assyriologist with expertise in
Mesopotamian literature, religion, and scholarship, gifted with an unrivalled
epigraphic eye and philological acumen. George boasts a broad range of
interests, covering topics such as Mesopotamian temples and cultic topography,
literature, incantations, divination, royal inscriptions, and private letters.
George is perhaps most recognized for his monumental edition of the Gilgamesh
Epic (@bib{RN117}), which he has updated for the eBL Corpus (see
@url{/corpus/L/1/4}{here}). Along with J. Taniguchi, George catalogued and
digitized Lambert’s notebooks and also processed and published over 650
cuneiform copies from Lambert’s Nachlass (@bib{RN1013a}, @bib{RN1013ab}).
George has generously donated his notebooks of transliterations for their use
in the Fragmentarium. George’s notebooks are a treasure trove of texts and
fragments, including transliterations of hundreds of tablets in the British
Museum’s “Sippar Collection”, as well as accurate editions of under-explored
genres such as Late Babylonian temple rituals."
/>
<h4>V.18. Ulla Koch</h4>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Ulla S. Koch is a scholar specializing in Mesopotamian extispicy, who has made
substantial contributions to this long-neglected field. Her handbook makes
Mesopotamian divination accessible to a wide audience (@bib{RN160xs}); her
monographs on Babylonian extispicy, particularly on the extispicy series
@i{Bārûtu}, have advanced the field greatly. Her text editions have enabled the
identification of many new fragments in the framework of the eBL project. In
addition, Koch has furnished the eBL Fragmentarium with her transliterations of
hundreds of fragments of extispicy texts."
/>
<h4>V.19. Jeremiah L. Peterson</h4>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Jeremiah Peterson is a Sumerologist specialising in Sumerian literature of the
Old Babylonian period. Gifted with an unparalleled eye for identifying even the
smallest fragments, Peterson has contributed dozens of new manuscripts to the
corpus of Sumerian literature. Peterson has published many fragments identified
by him in several ground-breaking contributions (e.g.
@bib{peterson2010sumerian3}, @bib{RN1734}, and @bib{RN306}). In addition, he is
responsible for the transliteration of thousands of fragments, in particular of
Old and Middle Babylonian literature and of first-millennium celestial
divination, in the eBL’s Fragmentarium. Peterson has kindly ceded his
collection of hand copies for its use in the Fragmentarium."
/>
<h4>V.20. Uri Gabbay</h4>
<MarkupParagraph
text="Uri Gabbay is an Associate Professor of Assyriology at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. He is a distinguished scholar who has made significant contributions
to the study of Mesopotamian religion and scholarship. His research focuses on
the reconstruction and study of Mesopotamian cultic compositions and the
interpretation of Mesopotamian scholarship. His ground-breaking edition of the
@i{Eršemma} prayers (@bib{RN2568}) is a testimony to his philological talent,
his methodical monograph on the exegetical terms used in Akkadian commentaries
(@bib{RN2779}) reveals his deep understanding with how the Mesopotamians
interpretated their own textual tradition. Gabbay has generously ceded his
transliterations of Emesal texts for their use in the Fragmentarium."
/>
</>
)
}