New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East’s oldest continuously spoken and written languages.
Members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California are helping the University’s Oriental Institute make very high-quality electronic images of nearly 700 Aramaic administrative documents. The Aramaic texts were incised in the surfaces of clay tablets with styluses or inked on the tablets with brushes or pens. Some tablets have both incised and inked texts.
Sounds like fun to me. 🙂
Thanks for this post. What would be great is if they made the electronic images available publicly for everyone to view, made their transcriptions of the Aramaic available, and the translations also. This would allow other Aramaic scholars to verify their work and help with the process. Otherwise, with this number of inscriptions, the work will probably remain unoublished and secret for years.
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