A key objective of the Ancient Records of Middle Eastern Polities (ARMEP) Project is the promotion of the digital humanities and easily accessible open-access data by widely disseminating and facilitating the active use and understanding of official inscriptions and archival texts of the Middle East in Antiquity, with an initial focus on those of ancient Mesopotamia (written in the cuneiform script and in the Akkadian and Sumerian languages), in academia and beyond. The ARMEP team (headed by Karen Radner [http://www.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/personen/mitarbeiter/radner/index.html] and Jamie Novotny [http://www.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/personen/mitarbeiter/novotny/index.html]) seeks to create new and innovative ways for users to access the important and varied contents of numerous geo-referenced and linguistically-annotated editions of ancient records, primarily from the first millennium BC. Our aim is to make many of the rich primary sources of Assyria, Babylonia, and their contemporaries available online for free in a fully searchable and richly annotated (lemmatized) format.
Ancient Records of Middle Eastern Polities is the parent project of Official Inscriptions of the Middle East in Antiquity [ http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/oimea/index.html] (OIMEA) and Archival Texts of the Middle East in Antiquity (ATMEA). It is the main/top-level project of the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative [ http://www.en.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/research/mocci/index.html] (MOCCI), a LMU Munich- [http://www.uni-muenchen.de/index.html] and Humboldt Foundation-funded [https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/home.html] Digital Humanities project. At present, ARMEP is modest in scope and is currently an umbrella project comprising several OIMEA [ http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/oimea/index.html] sub-projects (RIAo, RIBo, RINAP [in collaboration with Grant Frame at the University of Pennsylvania]) and The State Archives of Assyria online [ http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/index.html] (SAAo). In time, it will include corpora of texts written in other languages, including Aramaic, Phoenician, Luwian, Old Persian, and Urartian; for example, in 2017, the Electronic Corpus of Urartian Texts (eCUT) Project and the Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions online (ARIo) Project will be added to the data set.
The core LMU Munich (Historisches Seminar – Abteilung Alte Geschichte) team presently comprises:
This website was created as part of the research project Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative [ http://www.en.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/research/mocci/index.html] (MOCCI), whose funding is provided by LMU Munich and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (through the establishment of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East [http://www.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/lehrstuehle/ls_radner/index.html]) and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Historisches Seminar - Abteilung Alte Geschichte). With financial support from LMU Munich's Excellence Initiative, [https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/about_lmu/research/excellence_initiative/index.html] the core ARMEP team (Novotny and Radner) are currently developing an interactive map together with the LMU Munich's IT-Gruppe Geisteswissenschaften [http://www.itg.uni-muenchen.de/index.html] (David and Tobias Englmeier, under the direction of Dr. Christian Riepl and Dr. Stephan Lücke). This fully searchable map interface will not only display places where ancient texts were discovered and cities mentioned in ancient sources whose precise locations are known with a reasonable degree of certainty, but also allow users access to annotated text editions directly from the map. The anticipated availability of the ARMEP map is late 2017.
The contents of this website, except where noted below, are the intellectual property of the ARMEP Project. They are released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/] license.
This means that you are free to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt our work without permission, under the following conditions:
Any of these conditions may be waived in the right circumstances, if you explicitly ask us for permission.
Read our hints and suggestions for reusing material from Oracc [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/visitingoracc/reusingoracc/index.html]. For information on how to cite Oracc URLs online and in print, click here [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/visitingoracc/citingurls/index.html].
A mid-8th century BC wall painting of an Assyrian soldier with a horse from the provincial palace of Til-Barsip (mod. Tell Aḥmar) in Syria. Adapted from A. Parrot, Assur (Munich: Beck, 1961).
Jamie Novotny
Jamie Novotny, 'About the Project', Ancient Records of Middle Eastern Polities, The ARMEP Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2021 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/abouttheproject/]