Post by ۞Quaalude™۞ on Jun 7, 2011 17:13:07 GMT -5
Even a dead language can prompt lively debate, as Matthew W. Stolper, a Chicago professor long involved in the project, once wrote. The dictionary’s translations, he noted, “run the gamut between conclusions founded on an unshakable array of evidence and provocative assertions about slim data.” All in all, he said, this “has provoked, cajoled, advanced and shaped the scholarship of a generation of not always cheerful Mesopotamianists.”
Dr. Roth expects more of the same. She said the full dictionary “provides the foundation upon which all other scholarship will be built,” and was “never intended to be the last word.”
So why did the project take so long to complete?
At the start, Dr. Breasted foresaw a set of six volumes, modeled on the Oxford English Dictionary, being published simultaneously in two or three decades. But entering words and examples of their use on close to two million index cards was tedious work for the
Ninety years in the making, the 21-volume dictionary of the language of ancient Mesopotamia and its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects, unspoken for 2,000 years but preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions deciphered over the last two centuries, has finally been completed by scholars at the University of Chicago ,
professors and graduate students who were also busy with classes and other research. The low-tech task seemed endless: Previously unknown words or new usages of known words were always coming to light in archaeological ruins.
After World War II, the project was reorganized and the pace picked up; the first volume was published in 1956. Under the vigorous editorship of A. Leo Oppenheim, then Erica Reiner and finally Dr. Roth, 20 volumes were released over 55 years.
A full set sells for $1,995, and individual volumes range from $45 to $150. But they are also available, free of charge, online
oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/catalog/cad/ < Here For Free QC