Bilinguals in Late Mesopotamian Scholarship (BLMS)

公元前的第一个千年是历史上最具创造力的时代之一。在整个欧亚大陆，在希腊、以色列、印度和中国——所谓的轴心文明——创新的思想家重新定义了人类与宇宙之间的关系，其方式一直沿用至今。乍一看，美索不达米亚似乎站在这场革命之外，经常被视为与其更有活力的邻居形成静态对比。然而，我们拥有从一千年前美索不达米亚开始的大型皇家和学术图书馆，它们构成了古代世界已知的与宇宙本质知识接触的最大记录之一。此外，与早期的美索不达米亚语料的比较使我们看到，文明有自己的进化轨迹。反过来，这可以用来更好地理解其他轴心文明，他们自己的祖先缺乏如此详细的证明。利用美索不达米亚的数据来解释整个时期的智力发展的主要困难是，一小群训练有素的研究人员面临着一个压倒性的庞大语料库。黏土碑是美索不达米亚主要的书写媒介，它的耐久性确保了那里保存下来的原始文献比其他任何古代社会都要多。晚期美索不达米亚双语学者（BLMS）代表了古代美索不达米亚创新学者共同努力的成果中增加了一个新的组成部分，通过开发免费、开放的数字资源来解决这一问题。在过去的五年里，第一个千年语料库的各个部分的在线版本、翻译、查找辅助和解释都得到了发展。反过来，BLMS将重点关注公元前一千年以来美索不达米亚学术文本的核心群体之一，即所谓的“双语者”。这些是用苏美尔语写的神话、礼拜仪式和咒语，并被翻译成阿卡德语，代表了那个时期高级文士最珍贵的共同学习的一部分。该小组的成员在双语文本的专门编辑和对美索不达米亚文本的一般计算机处理方面都有经验。该项目首先为第一批千禧年双语者创建首个目录，以确定语料库的确切参数，然后将从原始文件和遗留材料中创建自己的双语文本数据库。这将与介绍性门户网站，复杂的搜索能力和翻译在线呈现。该项目的结果将为专家和非专业人士提供访问语料库的机会。该团队与许多项目密切相关，这些项目专注于美索不达米亚第一个千年文本记录的各个方面，所有这些项目都托管在Oracc上，这是PI Tinney创建的一个语料库建设中心，为汉字学家提供服务，BLMS也将托管在该中心上。因此，BLMS和它的同类项目将不仅相互丰富，而且通过他们对开放标准的使用，对可复制性和相对简单的技术的关注，为未来的工作提供了一个基础，同时也为其本身提供了一个目的。最终，该项目的目的是丰富我们对人类智力发展的关键时代的理解，使其最大的当代语料库之一可供广大学者访问。

The first millennium BCE is intellectually one of the most creative eras known to history. All across Eurasia, in Greece, Israel, India and China—the so-called Axial Civilizations—innovative thinkers redefined the relationship between humanity and the cosmos in ways that resonate down to this day. At first glance, Mesopotamia seems to stand outside this revolution and is often seen as a static contrast to its more vibrant neighbors. Yet we possess large royal and scholarly libraries from first millennium Mesopotamia that constitute one of the largest records of intellectual engagement with the nature of the cosmos known from the ancient world. Moreover, comparison with earlier Mesopotamian corpora allow us to see that the civilization had its own evolutionary trajectory. This in turn, can be used to gain a better understanding of the other Axial civilizations whose own antecedents lack such detailed attestation. The principal difficulty in exploiting the Mesopotamian data to explain the intellectual development of the period as a whole is that a small cadre of trained researchers is faced with an overwhelmingly large corpus. The durability of the clay tablets that provided Mesopotamia's main medium for writing has ensured that primary documentation has survived from there in greater numbers than any other ancient society. Bilinguals in Late Mesopotamian Scholarship (BLMS) represents the addition of a new component to the products of a concerted effort by innovative scholars of ancient Mesopotamia to remedy this situation by developing free, open digital resources which converge on this problem. Online editions, translations, finding aids and explanations of various parts of the first millennium corpus as a whole have been developed over the past five years. BLMS in its turn will focus on one of the core groups of Mesopotamian scholarly texts from the first millennium BCE, the so-called “bilinguals”. These are myths, liturgies and incantations written in Sumerian with a native translation into Akkadian that represent part of the most treasured learning common to senior scribes of the period. The team consists of members experienced both in the editing of bilingual texts specifically and in the computer processing of Mesopotamian texts in general. Beginning with the creation of the first ever catalog of first millennium bilinguals to establish the exact parameters of the corpus, the project will create its own database of the bilingual texts from both primary documents and legacy material. This will be presented online with an introductory portal, sophisticated search capabilities and translations.The project's results will be designed to provide access to the corpus for both specialists and nonspecialists alike. The team is closely connected to a number of projects focused on various aspects of the first millennium textual record from Mesopotamia, all of which are hosted on Oracc, a corpus-building center for cuneiformists founded by PI Tinney, on which BLMS will also be hosted. As a result of this, BLMS and its peer projects will not only be mutually enriching, but also through their use of open standards, a focus on replicability and relatively simple technology, provide a base for future work as much as an end in itself. Ultimately, the aim of the project is to enrich our understanding of a crucial era in humanity's intellectual development by making one of its largest contemporary corpora accessible to scholars at large.