The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, or Oracc, is an ongoing project designed to make the corpus of

cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-sha ...

compositions from the

ancient Near East The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, southeast Turkey, southwest Iran and northeastern Syria), ancient Egypt, ancient Iran ( Elam, ...

available online and accessible to users. The project, created by Steve Tinney of the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

, incorporates a number of sub-projects, including online publications of lemmatized texts in different genres, as well as extensive annotations and other tools for studying and learning about the ancient Near East. The sub-projects are directed by individual scholars specializing in the relevant topic. The overall project is led by a steering committee of Tinney,

Eleanor Robson Eleanor Robson, (born 1969) is a British Assyriologist and academic. She is Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern History at University College London. She is a former chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq and a Quondam fellow of A ...

Cambridge University , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

, and Niek Veldhuis of the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

Projects

Oracc currently includes several different kinds of projects. Some gather and present historical information for studying certain areas of ancient Near Eastern life or scholarship, including projects designed to contextualize specific textual corpora ("portals"). Others provide interfaces for searching corpora. These usually incorporate full transliterations and translations of texts in a given corpus, and many offer supplementary material such as an introduction to the corpus, discussion of its historical context, and interpretive syntheses of its content. A few other projects serve as research tools for Assyriological studies (dictionary, sign list).

Historical and cultural background

Textual corpora

Other projects

References

External links

*{{Official website, http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/
Oracc full text search
Cuneiform Assyriology