Digital Archiving of the Amarna Letters: Towards the Linguistic Study of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Fourteenth Century B.C.E.

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26870085
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Linguistics; Library and information science/Humanistic social informatics
• Research Institution: University of Tsukuba
• Principal Investigator: TAKAHASHI Yona 筑波大学, 人文社会系, 非常勤研究員 (90647702)
• Research Collaborator: IKEDA Jun 筑波大学, 人文社会系, 教授 (60288850) ; WAKI Toshihito 筑波大学, 人文社会系, 准教授 (70361293) ; NAGAI Masakatsu 筑波大学, 人文社会系, 助教 (70578369)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: アマルナ書簡 / ディジタルアーカイブズ / 楔形文字 / アッカド語 / カナン語 / 文献言語学 / Text Encoding Initiative / Linked Open Data

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The aim of this research is to construct a digital archive of the Amarna Letters, which were the diplomatic letters mainly from Ancient Palestine to Egypt in the fourteenth century B.C.E. These letters are important, not only in that they were inscribed by the cuneiform scripts on the clay tablets, but also in that they were written in the mixed language of both the official Akkadian and the local Canaanite language. This research succeeded to combine three different types of data in one digital platform, such as photos of the clay tablets stored in the image database, each cuneiform information and the linguistic analysis on the mixed language of the letters, by using the XML tagset provided by Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The research provides the theoretical and practical basis for the future study on the Digital Platform, as well as for the philological and general linguistic studies.

Free Research Field

言語学