Cuneiform Resources

This site assembles a few selected resources for languages of the Ancient Near East written in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform (Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, Palaic, Hattic, Luwian). Unless marked otherwise, these are local resources. Our efforts on languages of the Ancient Near East are still in their beginnings, and this site will be extended with our progress.

• Sign list for Akkadian and Hittite (compiled from Wikipedia and Wiktionary, CC-BY-SA)
  • 711 individual signs (plus 193 variants), 241 signs with logographic readings, 549 signs with Sumerian readings, 198 signs with Akkadian phonetic readings, 140 signs with Hittite phonetic readings
  • Un*x scripts to generate the list
• Cuneiform Composite Font (TTF, UTF8) from ORACC (SIL Open Font License)
• Anatolian sample texts from the Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien (TITUS)
  • Hittite Cuneiform Writing
  • Hittite Sign List
  • Hittite Sample Text: Anitta
  • Luwian Sample Text: Hittite-Luwian bilingue
  • Palaic Sample Text: Telipinu
• Selected data portals (external):
  • Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC), great collection of (mostly) Sumerian and Akkadian texts with partial morphological annotations, linked with images from CDLI
  • Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), (mostly) Sumerian and Akkadian texts augmented with pictures of the tablets, partially translated, no morphological annotations
  • Hethitologie Portal of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz and the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (German). Extensive collection of texts and accompanying pictures (tablets) for Hittite, Old Assyrian, Hurro-Akkadian (Nuzi), and other languages of the Hittite Empire (Hurrian, Palaic, Luwian, Hattic)
  • Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), corpus of morphologically annotated Sumerian text (discontinued)
  • Old Babylonian Text Corpus (OBTC), corpus of Old Babylonian texts with lemmatization and links to an on-site word list (full access for project members only)
• Rule-based Akkadian morphologies (external):
  • Steve Tinney's lemmatizer (Emacs plugin, supports manual annotation of Akkadian and Sumerian through interactive lookup in the corpus)
  • Aaron Mack's verbal morphology (2002) (web demo only, Verbs only, rule-based)
  • Akkadian Morphological Generator (Khait et al., in preparation) (web demo of an unreleased prototype, currently covering Old Babylonian Verbs and Nouns, rule-based)
  All these systems represent the basic state of the art, i.e., rule-based and example-based systems that support manual annotation. One of our prospective goals is to collaborate with the developers of these tools to provide statistical disambiguation routines.