Mechanisms of communication in an ancient empire: The correspondence between the king of Assyria and his magnates in the 8th century BC
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Grant Holder:
Dr Karen Radner
The correspondence between Sargon II, king of Assyria (721-705 BC), and his governors and magnates is the largest text corpus of this kind known from antiquity and provides insight into the mechanisms of communication between the top levels of authority in an ancient empire. This website presents these letters together with resources and materials for their study and on their historical and cultural context. The research questions are: How did ancient empires cohere? What roles did long-distance communication play in that coherence? How did long-distance communication work, structurally and socially? In the royal archives of Nineveh and Nimrud, now in northern Iraq, primary documentation has survived to an unparalleled extent, allowing us to tackle these questions for this particular period. Our research will be based on a thorough analysis of c. 1200 surviving letters and letter fragments of the correspondence of the king with his governors and magnates in order to establish the governing mechanisms of communication.
Generation of XHTML files from XML data for web-delivery
| Project start date: 2008-03 | Project end date: 2012-09 |
Subject domains:
Era(s):
Country/region(s):
| Methods used | Category |
|---|---|
| 2d Scanning and photography | Data capture |
| Accessibility analysis | Strategy and project management |
| Resource sharing | Communication and collaboration |
| Cataloguing and indexing | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Collating | Data analysis |
| Indexing | Data analysis |
| Content analysis | Data analysis |
| Documentation | Strategy and project management |
| Lemmatisation | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Text encoding - descriptive | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Text encoding - presentational | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Text encoding - referential | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Parsing | Data analysis |
| Searching and querying | Data analysis |
| Version control | Strategy and project management |
| Textual interaction (asynchronous) | Communication and collaboration |
| Textual interaction (synchronous) | Communication and collaboration |
| Web browser scripting | Data publishing and dissemination |
| Collaborative publishing | Data publishing and dissemination |
| text | Content types |
Funding sources:
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Content types created:
Dataset/structured data, Still Image/Graphics, Text
Software tools used:
Extensible Markup Language (XML), Filemaker Pro, EMACS
Source material used:
About 1200 clay tablets from Nineveh and Kalhu (Nimrud) in northern Iraq, inscribed in the Neo-
Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian dialects of the Akkadian language and in the cuneiform script. These are the surviving letters of the state correspondence of Sargon II, king of Assyria (r. 721-705 BC). Most of these texts are kept in the British Museum.
Professor Simo Parpola of the Helsinki Corpus of Neo-Assyrian Texts project provided a legacy database consisting of documented ASCII files of the transliterations and English translations, as published in the text editions of the series State Archives of Assyria.
Digital resource created:
[1] A freely available, online corpus containing searchable transliterations and English translations of the c. 1200 letters exchanged between Sargon II, king of Assyria (721-705 BC), and his governors and magnates, with bibliographies, metadata and two fully lemmatised glossaries of Akkadian words and proper nouns. The project uses open, standards-based encoding to create the text corpus as part of the Open, Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc). Oracc comprises a workspace and toolkit for the development of a complete corpus of cuneiform whose rich annotation and open licensing support the next generation of scholarly research.
[2] A richly illustrated dissemination website called "Assyrian empire builders: governors, diplomats and soldiers in the service of Sargon II, king of Assyria" that provides the historical and cultural contexts of the letters.
Access to digital resource:
Open Access
Data Formats created:
Text file (TXT), Extensible Markup Language (XML) TEI-compliant, File Interchange Format (JPG)
Metadata standards employed:
Dublin Core, simple (DC), Visual Resources Association Core 3.0 (VRA), Other
Institutions affiliated with this project:
| UK HE institutions involved: |
|---|
| University College London |
| UK HE institutions involved: |
|---|
| University of Pennsylvania |
Project staff and expertise:
| Principal staff member: | Dr Karen Radner |
|---|---|
| Other staff: | PhD student(s), Postdoctoral researcher(s) / Research assistant(s) |
| External expertise: |
| Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) of record | Karen Radner |
| Title | Mechanisms of communication in an ancient empire: The correspondence between the king of Assyria and his magnates in the 8th century BC |
| Record created | 2010-04-27 |
| Record updated | 2010-06-29 09:51 |
| URL of record | http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/3691 |
| Citation of record | Karen Radner: Mechanisms of communication in an ancient empire: The correspondence between the king of Assyria and his magnates in the 8th century BC. <http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/3691> created: 2010-04-27, last updated 2010-06-29 09:51 |