One of the most advanced databases at Ca’ Foscari reveals the secrets of cuneiform writing

A combination of new technologies and ancient scripts, from digital and research to databases and clay tablets, at Ca’ Foscari an avant-garde team applies digital methods for the study of the oldest written sources in the world.

The recent opportunity to take stock of these issues was the ‘Thinking Digital in Cuneiform Studies: Methods, Problems, Perspectives’ workshop organised by the Department of Humanities. A team of international scholars (Toronto, Berlin, Munich, Madrid, Paris, Vienna) decided to test jointly the most recent digital methodologies together with their Italian colleagues (Ca’ Foscari, National Research Council) the most recent digital methodologies for the study of written sources of ancient Mesopotamia, dated from the fourth to the first millennium BC.
The topics dealt within the conference include: neural networks for the automatic translation of tens of thousands of clay tablets scattered in museums around the world, the network analysis of ancient sources, data models, tools for the study of content and paleography, the digital reconstruction of the Elba archives (the oldest known, which the archaeological context can be rebuilt for). Regarding Elba, professor Lucio Milano (History of the Ancient Near East) and Massimo Maiocchi (Research associate at Ca’ Foscari and Research Fellow at the Oriental Institute in Chicago) presented the new online website for the Elba Digital Archives project, ebda.cnr.it, developed together with Francesco Di Filippo (CNR), with the guidance of Professor Renzo Orsini (Databases and Information Systems).

The initiative is part of the broader panorama of studies on Digital Humanities, for which the Venetian University has acquired national and international prestige. Among the most recent awards, we have received 7 and a half million euros for the construction of a new Digital Humanities Centre in the Department of Humanities. This funding has been given by the department as one of the Italian Departments of Excellence, projected towards this area of research in the near future.

The Elba Digital Archives project was born in this context. The ambitious goal is to reconstruct the oldest archive of texts around the world in digital form, whilst the archaeological context is known. It deals with about 3,000 documents written in cuneiform, a real library, not only a single text, dated to 2400 BC, found in Syria, at the Tell Mardikh site, about 60 km south of Aleppo. The texts represent human cultural heritage, and a mine of inestimable information for the reconstruction of ancient history. These include the first known international treaty, first letters, first bilingual vocabularies, rituals, literature, historiographical and administrative texts.

Because of their archaicity these sources are however difficult to understand. To remedy this situation, the Ca’ Foscari research team has decided to adopt the most recent digital methodologies, and develop their own. The combination of philological experts of ancient texts and computer science has produced one of the most advanced databases in the world for the study of ancient sources - certainly the most sophisticated with regard to the digital representation of cuneiform writing. One of the major obstacles that have been overcome is the complexity of the sources in ancient Mesopotamia, which by their very nature are not alphabetised: a sign can represent a word, a syllable, or a semantic class. The efforts were therefore aimed at rethinking the approach to the representation of ancient texts in a digital way - hence the conference title, ‘Thinking Digital in Cuneiform Studies’.

Although the pioneering model presented by the Venetian researchers is still only used for the Elba texts, it has the potential to become the new standard for all databases that deal with the texts of ancient Mesopotamia. The conference was also used to start an international dialogue with the colleagues involved in other Digital Humanities projects for cuneiform sources. The fertile climate of collaboration thus established aims to produce further advances in the knowledge of ancient history in the coming years, also thanks to the development of new digital tools, which the Venetian University confirms are great innovators.