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, 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 had not 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 United States and Canada.
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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 two 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 encyclopaedia than glossary, offering a window into the ancient society of Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq, through every conceivable form of writing — letters, recipes, tax records, medical prescriptions, astronomical observations, religious texts, contracts, epics, poems and more.
To Gil Stein, director of the university's Oriental Institute (the dictionary's home), “The Assyrian Dictionary gives us the key into the world's first urban civilization.”
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“If we ever want to understand our roots,” Stein adds, “we have to understand this first great civilization.” Online, it is at Chicago Assyrian Dictionary — http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/cad/ — AP