An
image taken by one of North Star's scanners of a model ancient clay
ball. The objects contain tokens, which represent items exchanged during
a transaction.
Northstar Imaging Inc.’s 3-D X-ray machines are often used to scan
medical devices and aerospace products. This week, though, the company’s
technology is helping solve an ancient mystery.
The University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute is using Rogers-based Northstar’s CT scanners to peer into “clay balls” that date back to 3,500 B.C.
The artifacts are akin to a receipt for a business transaction. They
contain tokens that represent items exchanged during a transaction.
Experts at the Oriental Institute didn’t want to break open the clay
balls to see what was inside, which is where Northstar’s imaging
technology comes in. The company’s CT scanners can see through the
balls’ outer shells and reveal the shapes of the objects inside.
The clay balls tie in with a larger special exhibit, called Visible
Language, that was held at the Oriental Institute from ran from last
fall through March 2011. (You can read a New York Times story on that exhibit here.) There’s no word yet on exactly what the imaging work uncovered. (Scans were being taken Thursday and Friday.)
Northstar’s technology has been used in other archaeological endeavors. The Science Museum of Minnesota used it to scan a 150 million-year-old fossilized crocodile skull, for instance.
Bir Umm Fawakhir is a fifth-sixth century A.D. Coptic/Byzantine gold-mining town located in the central Eastern Desert of Egypt. The Bir Umm Fawakhir Project of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago carried out four seasons of archaeological survey at the site, in 1992, 1993, 1996, and 1997; one season of excavation in 1999; and one study season in 2001. This volume is the final report on the 1996 and 1997 seasons. The goals of the 1996 and 1997 field seasons were to complete the detailed map of the main settlement, to continue the investigation of the outlying clusters of ruins or "Outliers," and to address some specific questions such as the ancient gold-extraction process. The completion of these goals makes the main settlement at Bir Umm Fawakhir one of the only completely mapped towns of the period in Egypt. Not only is the main settlement plotted room for room and door for door, but also features such as guardposts, cemeteries, paths, roads, wells, outlying clusters of ruins, and mines are known, and some of these are features not always readily detectable archaeologically. This volume presents the pre-Coptic material; a detailed discussion of the remains in the main settlement, outliers, and cemeteries; the Coptic/Byzantine pottery, small finds, and dipinti; as well as a study of ancient mining techniques.
William M. Sumner, a leading figure in the study of ancient Iran and director of the Oriental Institute from 1989 to 1997, died July 7 in Columbus, Ohio. Sumner, who oversaw a major expansion of the institute’s building, was 82.
Sumner, a resident of Columbus, was a 1952 graduate of the United
States Naval Academy. He served in the Navy until 1964, rising to the
rank of lieutenant commander.
He developed his interest in
archaeology during naval service in the Mediterranean. Visits to ancient
sites in Italy and Greece inspired him to pursue a graduate education.
While serving in Iran, he developed a keen interest in the country’s
ancient civilization, and he pursued that interest by taking a class
taught at Tehran University by Prof. Ezat Ngahban, a graduate of the
University of Chicago.
He resigned from the Navy to pursue
graduate work in anthropology. He received his PhD from the University
of Pennsylvania in 1972 and was a member of the anthropology faculty at
Ohio State University from 1971 until 1989, when he joined the UChicago
faculty as professor in the Oriental Institute and Near Eastern
Languages & Civilizations.
“Bill Sumner was an outstanding archaeologist and a transformational leader at the Oriental Institute,” said Gil Stein,
director of the Oriental Institute. “His survey and excavations at the
urban center of Malyan in the highlands of Iran made a lasting
contribution to our understanding of the Elamite civilization and the
deep roots of the Persian empire. He trained an entire generation of
archaeologists who went on to become major scholars in their own right
in the study of ancient Iran and Anatolia.
“As director of the
Oriental Institute, Bill Sumner had the vision, the drive and the
organizational skills to conceptualize and carry out the building of our
new wing, and the complete reinstallation of our permanent museum
galleries. Most of all, Bill was a man with tremendous personal
integrity, who led by example. His death is a sad loss for our field,
and we will miss him very deeply,” Stein added.
At the Oriental
Institute, Sumner encouraged the use of new technologies to expand the
work of archaeologists in the field and in the laboratory.
“He
saw the value, and sensed the impending importance of digital
communication and publication, and laid the foundations for the next
decade of development along these lines in the OI,” said Gene Gragg,
professor emeritus at the Oriental Institute, who succeeded Sumner as
director.
Sumner recognized the value to archaeology and history
of the use of computational technologies and scientific instrumentation.
“Bill was a visionary, one of the first who understood the ways that
digitalization and computational tools could transform the humanistic
and social science disciplines,” said Martha T. Roth,
the Chauncey S. Boucher Distinguished Service Professor of Assyriology
in the Oriental Institute and dean of the Humanities Division. “And he
was a scholar and person of deep personal and professional integrity.”
He also oversaw the initiation of the largest expansion of the Oriental
Institute building since it was constructed in 1931. With the help of a
federal grant and a $10.1 million campaign, the institute built anew
wing to provide space for climate-control equipment, as well as provide
space for proper and climate-controlled artifact and archival storage.
The new wing also houses a modern artifact conservation laboratory.
The Oriental Institute’s museum also underwent a massive redesign
that began under his leadership. That led to a rearrangement of the
galleries and an updated presentation of the museum’s art and artifacts
from throughout the ancient Middle East.
Sumner’s own academic
specialty was ancient Iran. From 1972 to 1978 he directed the University
of Pennsylvania’s excavations at the site of Tal-i Malyan, ancient
Anshan, in the Fars province in western Iran. Sumner oversaw the
publication of a series of monographs based on five seasons of fieldwork
there.
The Malyan archaeological project was seminal, not only
in discovering the highland Elamite city of Anshan, known locally as
Malyan, but also in the cycles of nomadism and sedentism in the region
of Fars, that operated in the region from at least the fifth-millennium
B.C., said Abbas Alizadeh, an Oriental Institute archaeologist who
specializes on Iran.
In addition to his work on the Malyan
monograph series, Sumner wrote many articles on the development of
civilization in ancient Iran.
He is survived by wife, Kathleen
Sumner; children, William (Kristin) Sumner, Jane Sumner; step-children,
Douglas (Jamie) MacLean and Megan (Savady) Yem; sister, Ida VSW Red;
grandchildren, Katrina MacFarland, Eirian Yem, Dylan Yem, Shane Yem,
Devon Yem, Lachlan MacLean and Emma MacLean; and great-grandchildren,
Nolan and Adeline MacFarland, Anthony Sumner, and Ashley and Colin
Sizemore.
With the announcement on April 13, 2011 of the appearance in print and online of last volume of the The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the project is complete.
I am collecting here a variety of things most but not all of them open access, written about the CAD:
THE CHICAGO ASSYRIAN DICTIONARY AT SEVENTY
By Matthew W. Stolper, Professor, The Oriental Institute and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago
(This article originally appeared in The Oriental Institute News and Notes, No. 129, May-June 1991, and is made available electronically with the permission of the editor.)
ERICA REINER was born 4 August 1924, in Budapest, to Imre,
a young lawyer, and Clara (née Ehrenfeld), both from well-to-
do modern Orthodox Jewish families. Erica and my mother,
Anna Reiner, close fi rst cousins, spent school vacations together either
in the country at my mother’s or in the city at Erica’s. My mother talked
about the elegance of Erica’s Budapest home—the Fräulein teaching
French and German to Erica and her sister, Eva; shopping at the best
stores; always the best schools. At university in Budapest, Erica studied
French literature and Semitics. Her father was by then a prominent
lawyer, and later a member of the Judenrat in the ghetto. Even during
the darkest days of 1944–45, when Jews were restricted and then pro-
hibited from public life, Erica refused to stop attending classes; she
simply removed her yellow star and went to lectures. Although many
members of the Reiner family, particularly of the older generation,
shared the fate of most Hungarian Jewry, many of Imre’s immediate
and extended family whom he had brought into the shrinking Budapest
ghetto (including my mother), survived long enough to see liberation.
In 1948 Erica received her licence from Péter University in Buda-
pest, and went off to Paris to continue her studies in French literature.
There she lived with her mother’s brother, Michel Gyarmaty, who was
the artistic director of the Folies Bergères. Michel’s apartment, like his
stage sets, was elaborate, gilded, and baroque, and he introduced Erica
to a new and exciting life in postwar Paris. In addition to giving her the
decorating and entertaining style for which Erica became famous at the
University of Chicago in Hyde Park, two important events in those
years shaped her life. First, when Erica realized that she and later her
family would not return to Hungary and that a career in French litera-
ture would elude her in Paris, she switched her studies to Semitic lan-
guages and linguistics, and began studying with Professor Jean Nou-
gayrol. Second, the twenty-four-year-old Hungarian beauty had a tragic
love affair. Her Spanish lover, an engineering student, eventually re-
turned to Spain; but he left her with a deep commitment to his Catholic
faith, which Erica made her own. As devout a Jew as she had been be-
fore, in Paris she turned her passion to Catholicism and remained a de-
vout Catholic for the rest of her life...
With the final volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD) due for publication, it is time to set down the practices and norms of writing the articles followed by the past generations of Editors in order to assist future generations of readers in using the Dictionary. The history of the project has been told by I. J. Gelb in his “Introduction” to CAD A/1, published in 1964, and by Erica Reiner in her 2002 An Adventure of Great Dimension. Each of these two works, idiosyncratic and subjective, is important for understanding the personalities and decision-making of the formative years of the Dictionary. Yet the only published “guides” to reading the CAD are A. L. Oppenheim’s 1956 “Foreword” to the first published CAD volume and notes imbedded within a 1966 review by J. A. Brinkman. What follows, then, is based on the oral legacy passed on by Erica Reiner, and on a variety of documents, manuals, and files used by the Editors in Charge (A. Leo Oppenheim, Erica Reiner, and Roth) and especially by the manuscript Editors Richard T. Hallock (G, Ḫ), Elizabeth Bowman (D, E, I/J, Z, Ṣ), Marie-Anne Honeywell (Ṣ), Jane Rosenthal (A/1), Jean Eckenfels (B, A/2), Marjorie Elswick (A/2, K, L, M/1, M/2), Claire Lincoln, Peter T. Daniels (N/1, N/2, Q, S, Š/1, Š/2, Š/3), Julie Robinson (S, Š/1, Š/2, Š/3), Carol Meyer (Š/1, Š/2, Š/3), and Linda McLarnan (R, P, Š/1, Š/2, Š/3, T, Ṭ, U/W)...
The University News office reported that just one month after its
completion was announced in early June, the dictionary logged 100,000
downloads from the Oriental Institute’s website. The 21-volume Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Project, completed 90 years after the project began, was also the subject of a two-part discussion on WFMT’s Critical Thinking, hosted by University of Chicago alum Andrew Patner. Editor-in-charge Martha Roth, the Dean of the Division of the Humanities, and Robert Biggs,
a retired professor of Assyriology who has been working on the
dictionary since 1963, spoke with Patner in late August and early
September about this fascinating project. To listen to Part 1, click here. To listen to Part 2, click here.
A selection of the reporting on the completion of The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
The definition of persistence A 90-year project chronicling the ancient Akkadian language culminates in the 21st volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary.
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.
This was the language that Sargon the Great, king of Akkad in the 24th century B.C., spoke to command what is reputed to be the world's first empire, and that Hammurabi used around 1700 B.C. to proclaim the first known code of laws. It was the vocabulary of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first masterpiece of world literature. Nebuchadnezzar II presumably called on these words to soothe his wife, homesick for her native land, with the promise of cultivating the wondrous Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
On all levels, this was the language of enterprise, the irrigation of lands and shipments of cultivated grain, and of fate foretold. Medical texts in Babylonia gave explicit instructions as to how to read a sheep's liver to divine the future.
At a conference on Monday, historians, archaeologists and specialists in ancient Semitic languages assessed the significance of the comprehensive dictionary, which Gil Stein, director of the university's Oriental Institute, said "is an indispensable research tool for any scholar anywhere who seeks to explore the written record of the Mesopotamian civilization."
One scholar who has relied on the project's research at various stages since the 1960s, Jerrold Cooper, professor emeritus in Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins University, said the dictionary's importance "can't possibly be overestimated." It opens up for study "the richest span of cuneiform writing," he said, referring to the script invented in the fourth millennium B.C. by the earlier Sumerians in Mesopotamia...
Some might wonder if it is a bit late in the game, but scholars at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute have finally completed the Assyrian Dictionary, listing 28,000 words of a language that hasn't been used for more than 2,000 years.
Published in 21 volumes, the dictionary project was started in 1921. In all, 88 scholars worked 90 years to compile it. At $1,400 a set, it will be sold mostly to universities, enabling students and scholars to study and read a reproduction of millions of original documents — sun-baked clay cuneiform tablets — left behind by the world's first civilizations.
Wedge-shaped indentations pressed into the clay formed the first known written language. The tablets hold the written history of life over 2,500 years in early nation-states in what is modern-day Iraq. The writers recorded transactions, laws, marriages, divorces, legal disputes, literature, religious texts and personal correspondence. The vast correspondence even includes a bratty letter from a spoiled rich kid...
The project to create the Assyrian dictionary, based on words recorded on clay or stone tablets unearthed from ruins in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, began at the University of Chicago in 1921.
The language had not been spoken for more than 2,000 years.
Over several generations scholars from Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Berlin, Helsinki, Baghdad and London travelled to Chicago to work on the endeavour.
The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is now officially complete. It contains 21 volumes of Akkadian, a Semitic language, with several dialects, including Assyrian, that was in use for 2,500 years Gil Stein, director of the university's Oriental Institute, said: "The Assyrian Dictionary gives us the key into the world's first urban civilisation.
"Virtually everything that we take for granted has its origins in Mesopotamia, whether it's the origins of cities, of state societies, the invention of the wheel, the way we measure time, and most important the invention of writing...
Released: 6/5/2011 2:30 PM EDT Source: University of Chicago
21-volume work details the language and culture of ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia
Newswise — An ambitious project to identify, explain and provide citations for the words written in cuneiform on clay tablets and carved in stone by Babylonians, Assyrians and others in Mesopotamia between 2500 B.C. and A.D. 100 has been completed after 90 years of labor, the University of Chicago announced June 5.
To mark the completion of the 21-volume Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the Oriental Institute at the University, where the project was housed, will hold a conference Monday, June 6, during which scholars from around the world will discuss the significance of the achievement...
This conference, sponsored by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, marks the completion this year of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD). Ninety years in the making, the CAD is internationally recognized as the authoritative reference and research resource for the ancient Akkadian language. The detailed entries in the CAD constitute an unrivalled “cultural encyclopedia” for ancient Mesopotamia. The conference highlights the centrality of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary’s current and future intellectual contribution to Mesopotamian studies. Leading scholars in Mesopotamian studies will discuss the ways that the CAD has enriched research in their particular fields of study –Art History, Archaeology, Sumerology, and History and Biblical Studies. The conference will also feature a talk presenting an overview of the CAD project by Editor–in-Charge and Dean of the Humanities Prof. Martha Roth.
The conference will be held in the Oriental Institute’s Breasted Auditorium, 1155 East 58th St., Monday June 6, 2011, from 2:00-6:00 pm, and will be followed by a reception in the Edgar and Deborah Jannotta Mesopotamian Gallery.
2:00PM — Welcome
Gil J. Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute, The University of Chicago
2:10 PM — “The Assyrian Dictionary”
Martha T. Roth, CAD Editor-in-Charge and Dean of the Humanities, The University of Chicago
2:40 PM — “The CAD: Oxygen for the Sumerologist”
Jerrold S. Cooper, Johns Hopkins University
3:10 PM — Coffee break
3:30 PM — “The Achievement of the CAD: Notes from the Periphery”
Peter Machinist, Harvard University
4:00 PM — “Archaeological Perspectives”
McGuire Gibson, The University of Chicago
Persons with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this event should contact the event sponsor for assistance. For events on the Student Events Calendar, please contact ORCSA at (773) 702-8787. Information on Assistive Listening Device
CHICAGO — It was a monumental project with modest beginnings: a small group of scholars and some index cards. The plan was to explore a long-dead language that would reveal an ancient world of chariots and concubines, royal decrees and diaries – and omens that came from the heavens and sheep livers.
The year: 1921. The place: The University of Chicago. The project: Assembling an Assyrian dictionary based on words recorded on clay or stone tablets unearthed from ruins in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, written in a language that hadn't been uttered for more than 2,000 years. The scholars knew the project would take a long time. No one quite expected how very long.
Decades passed. The team grew. Scholars arrived from Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Berlin, Helsinki, Baghdad and London, joining others from the U.S. and Canada. One generation gave way to the next, one century faded into the next. Some signed on early in their careers; they were still toiling away at retirement. The work was slow, sometimes frustrating and decidedly low-tech: Typewriters. Mimeograph machines. And index cards. Eventually, nearly 2 million of them.
And now, 90 years later, a finale. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is now officially complete – 21 volumes of Akkadian, a Semitic language (with several dialects, including Assyrian) that endured for 2,500 years. The project is more encyclopedia than glossary, offering a window into the ancient society of Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq, through every conceivable form of writing: love letters, recipes, tax records, medical prescriptions, astronomical observations, religious texts, contracts, epics, poems and more...
BY KARA SPAK Staff Reporter/kspak@suntimes.com Jun 3, 2011 8:08PM
Martha Roth, finished a 90 year project at the University of Chicago, creating a 21-volume dictionary of language and culture of ancient Mespotamian, here her work at U of C Oriental Institute, 59th and University Avenue, Thursday, June 2, 2011. | John H. White~Sun-Times.
Love notes and divorce papers. Accounting ledgers and legal briefs. Omens, letters between kings, thoughts on the benefits of flaxseed and the fortune-telling properties of sheep livers.
All were carved in stone or written in cuneiform on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia — the cradle of human civilization — between 2500 BC and AD 100. Scholars at the University of Chicago have worked for nearly a century on a comprehensive guide for those reading the ancient language in which some of the earliest days of human history were written.
Ninety years in the making, the 21-volume, 28,000-word Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is complete. Started in 1921, the dictionary was created over the years by about 85 employees writing on millions of index cards in up to five large offices at the school’s Oriental Institute at University Avenue and 58th Street.
The first volume was published in 1956. Forty years after that, the current editor saw the beginning of the end.
“My goal since I took over in 1996 as the editor in charge was to bring the project to an end, not keep it going,” said Martha Roth. “My way of understanding my job was to complete it.”
The dictionary project was started by Oriental Institute founder James Henry Breasted, a Middle Eastern archeologist who envisioned the Chicago school being able to “recover the lost story of the rise of man.”
Organized more like an encyclopedia, the dictionary is a primary source used by scholars, students or any one researching ancient Mesopotamia. While it’s called the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the Assyrian language is a dialect of Akkadian, another Semitic language. All Akkadian dialects are included in the Chicago dictionary.
While Roth has been the project’s editor since 1996, she first started working on the dictionary in 1979 as a post-doctorate with a “brand new PhD in Assyriology.” Her degree was from the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked on a Sumerian dictionary project inspired by the Chicago Assyrian dictionary.
Roth joined the U. of C. faculty in 1980 and in 1996, she was named the dictionary’s editor. She said she never found the project overwhelming — though the end of the project came as an “abrupt jolt.”
“It’s hard for many people to understand the kind of stick-to-it this kind of project takes,” she said. “It’s not just this current world where everyone’s attention span is short. Many people like to dabble in things. They don’t like to sit for hours.”
Or in her case, years. Spending time developing the entries brought her a rare depth of insight and diversity of scholarship, she said.
“Usually a scholar will specialize in a particular genre or period,” she said. “When you work on a project like this dictionary project, it’s like basically being in an intellectual smorgasbord. You’re sampling things all the time.”
At various points during the project’s long history, scholars tried to modernize the process, including attempting to put portions of the project on IBM hole punch cards in the 1960s. Transferring all the cards onto computers would have taken decades, Roth said. Instead, they now are going into a safe archive.
For Roth, now that the dictionary is complete, there won’t be any celebratory vacation to lands near the Fertile Crescent. She’s still working as a professor as well as dean of humanities and doesn’t anticipate her schedule freeing up.
“You don’t retire from being an Assyriologist,” she said. “I’ve always been engaged in working in legal history and now I’m able to spend more time with that. I look forward to it.”
A new dissertation from The University of Michigan:
History and Narrative in a Changing Society: James Henry Breasted and the Writing of Ancient Egyptian History in Early Twentieth Century America
by Ambridge, Lindsay J., Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2010, 192 pages; AAT 3441141
[If you are inside the University of Chicago domain, you will find this title here. If not, you need to search through your own institution which has a license to ProQuest, UMI Dissertations]
This study is a critical analysis of the foundational historiography of ancient Egypt, focused on the scholarship of James Henry Breasted (1865-1935), the first American professor of Egyptology. Breasted wrote prolifically and broadly during his thirty-year career. His work is a reference point from which to investigate the effects of political, cultural, and economic variables on the historical narratives of ancient Egypt during his generation. My aim is to establish the political and cultural context in which he worked, examining the degree to which the social discourse of the era influenced the interpretation of ancient Egyptian history.
Primary source material includes four of Breasted's major academic works, a selection of his shorter writings, and archival material from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Archive Center. Breasted's written work has been the subject of very little critical analysis despite its long standing as fundamental scholarship in the discipline. Intending to establish a new, scientific Egyptology in America, he wrote A History of Egypt (1905) as a popular demonstration of the type of history that could be produced using his methods of meticulous textual research. I argue that his interpretation of the Egyptian past was heavily influenced by both evolutionary and diffusionist theories of social change, and he was an important disseminator of these ideas for the popular audience. From 1914 onward, Breasted's writing exhibits an increasing tendency to explicate the forces which drive civilization and to trace them to their origin; the intersecting axes of geography, chronology and race became guiding concerns of his work. Amidst early twentieth century political and social upheaval, he constructs an image of an ordered world in which imperialism, economic exploitation and industrialism were necessary to human advancement. Concern for processes of cultural evolution continues with his interpretations of ancient Egyptian religion, in which he correlates industrial development and imperial expansion with spiritual growth. His explanation of religious development is best understood when it is seen as in dialogue with his understandings of socio-economic class, environment, and morality.
OI History is a place for documentation and discussion of the history of the Oriental Institute. Participation and collaboration is welcome from anyone who has something to contribute to the discussion. You can contribute by commenting on blog posts, or if you wish to participate fully, by becoming a member of the blog community. To do this, send a message to Chuck Jones.
OI History is not a project of the Oriental Institute or of The University of Chicago. It is a private initiative of the participants who take full responsibility for its content.
An image taken by one of North Star's scanners of a model ancient clay ball. The objects contain tokens, which represent items exchanged during a transaction.
’s 3-D X-ray machines are often used to scan medical devices and aerospace products. This week, though, the company’s technology is helping solve an ancient mystery.
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