saving iraq's cultural heritage
Ancient tablets go online
BY AJAY SINGH
UCLA Today Staff
A veteran UCLA scholar has won a grant to support his efforts
to preserve Iraq’s cultural heritage. Robert Englund, a professor
of Near Eastern languages and cultures, recently received $96,588
from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to develop
an online catalog of cuneiform tablets at the Iraq National Museum.
The funding is part of a $559,000 NEH initiative, “Recovering
Iraq’s Past,” aimed at supporting projects to conserve
and document Iraq’s cultural resources, which are among the
world’s most ancient.
Englund and his team of researchers have been engaged in the Cuneiform
Digital Library Initiative, an electronic database created at UCLA
in 2000. Cuneiform is a wedge-shaped script that the ancestors of
Iraqis, the Mesopotamians, used to record the world’s first
administrative and economic transactions on clay tablets in the
late 4th and 3rd millennium B.C. Later, these tablets included literary
texts in the now-dead language, Sumerian.
Englund is currently making digital copies, electronic transliterations
and annotations of cuneiform tablets obtained from Europe and Turkey.
His work will conclude with a similar documentation of material
from Iraq, Iran and Syria, where major collections of the tablets
are located. He has already cataloged about 90,000 tablets, which
are available at http://cdli.ucla.edu/.
His team is in touch with several institutional partners in an effort
to document all of the 500,000 tablets that scholars believe exist
worldwide.
As long as Iraq’s security situation remains dangerous,
Englund plans to gather all possible data outside the country. At
the same time, he expects to work with Iraqi officials to begin
preparing an online database of cuneiform tablets at the Baghdad
museum, which was looted during the Iraq war last year.
Some of that loot has evidently been showing up on eBay, selling
for as little as $10 apiece. “We suspect that this is new
material recently excavated from Iraq, but it’s impossible
to say with clarity that it has been illegally excavated,”
Englund said. “If I see something that looks fishy, I will
tell international policing agencies.”
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