Diachronic Corpus of Sumerian Literature

Oriental Studies Faculty, Marc Van De Mieroop (now at Columbia), Jacob Dahl (from October 2008) - John Fell Fund

Principal Investigator / Director: Marc Van De Mieroop (now at Columbia), Jacob Dahl (from October 2008)

Oxford participants: Jacob Dahl

Other Participants: not specified

Project Webpage: http://dcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/

Start Date: 2005

End Date: Ongoing

Funder: John Fell Fund

Partner organizations (inside or outside Oxford): 

Graham Cunningham (Cambridge)

 

 

Project Description:

The Diachronic Corpus of Sumerian Literature (DCSL) project seeks to establish a web-based corpus of Sumerian literature spanning the entire history of Mesopotamian civilization, over a range of 2500 years. It will make this corpus accessible and searchable on the model now provided by the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL). The ultimate research aim of the project is to make the corpus available for analysis in terms of change. Such an analysis hopes to contribute to the study of the intellectual history of Ancient Mesopotamia.

The project received a pump-priming grant from the John Fell OUP fund to begin work on the first stage in creating the corpus, compiling a diachronic catalogue of Sumerian literature. This catalogue displays the distribution of Sumerian literature across both space and time, and provides details of the primary and secondary sources for each composition.