About the Project

The Archival Texts of the Assyrian Empire (ATAE) Project was started at LMU Munich in 2017 as part of the umbrella project Archival Texts of the Middle East in Antiquity (ATMEA), a sub-project of Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI) [https://www.en.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/research/mocci/index.html], which was founded in August 2015 as part of of the establishment of the LMU's Chair for the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East [https://www.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/lehrstuehle/ls_radner/index.html] (held by Karen Radner [https://www.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/personen/mitarbeiter/radner/index.html]).

ATAE brings together editions and translations of archival texts from various sites within the Assyrian Empire and it aims to be an expanded and updated version of the State Archives of Assyria online (SAAo) [/saao/index.html] corpus, which had been initiated in 2007 by Radner at University College London, with heritage data provided by Simo Parpola (Helsinki).

The 5,058 texts currently included in SAAo provide the bulk of MOCCI's in-progress Archival Texts of the Assyrian Empire (ATAE) Project, a corpus-building project that will expand the Nineveh-focused SAAo corpus by adding fully-annotated editions of archival material not only discovered in Assyria's principal administrative and religious centers — Assur (Qalat Sherqat), Kalhu (Nimrud; biblical Calah), and Nineveh (Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus) — but also at smaller provincial sites such as Burmarina (Tell Shiukh Fawqani), Dur-Katlimmu (Tell Sheikh Hamad), Dur-Šarrukin (Khorsabad), Guzana (Tell Halaf), Huzirina (Sultantepe), Imgur-Enlil (Balawat), Kunalia (Tell Tayinat), Ma'allanate (unidentified), Marqasu (Kahramanmaraş), Sam'al (Zinçirli), Šibaniba (Tell Billa), Til-Barsip (Tell Ahmar), and Tušhan (Ziyaret Tepe).

The first group of texts to be made available on ATAE (apart from the aforementioned sources published already on SAAo) were the 113 texts written in the Assyrian dialect of Akkadian published by Betina Faist (Heidelberg) in 2007; these documents originate from sixteen different archives unearthed in different buildings at Assur, Assyria's traditional religious and administrative capital. All 113 of these have been adapted to Oracc style, revised, lemmatized (linguistically annotated), and translated into English by Poppy Tushingham (2017–), with the assistance of Alexander Kudryavtsev (2020), Nathan Morello (2017–20), and Jamie Novotny (2017–). This important group of texts, which has not been previously translated into English, was made public in February 2021, thus kicking off Phase One of ATAE.

In February and March 2021, ATAE was restructured and greatly expanded. Sub-projects were created for each of the above-mentioned fourteen cities where Neo-Assyrian archival texts were discovered. For Assur and Kalhu, additional sub-projects were created for (major) publications editing documents from those two Assyrian administrative and religious centers. The current Assur sub-projects are al-Rafidan 17, SAAo Assur, SAAB 5 and 9, StAT 1, StAT 2, StAT 3, WVDOG 152, and Assur Miscellanea; while the current Kalhu sub-projects are CTN 1, CTN 2, CTN 3, CTN 6, Edubba 10, and SAAo Kalhu. In addition, the ATAE team wrote several informational pages to help users switch between translation languages (currently English, German [for some Assur sub-projects], and Turkish [for the Marqasu sub-project]), reuse ATAE material, and understand ATAE catalogue metadata (which is displayed in the Item View of each text in the Oracc pager). Lastly, the ATAE team has made JSON, TEI, and C-ATF transliteration files freely available for download; click here [/atae/ataedownloads/index.html] to visit the ATAE Downloads page.

The project was greatly facilitated in early 2021 by a number of scholars who kindly provided us with electronic files for conversion to Oracc ATF format. Therefore, we would like to thank Faruk Akyüz (on behalf of his colleagues Salih Çeçen, Lütfi Gürkan Gökçek, and Cahit Günbatti), Aron Dornauer, Andreas Fuchs, Francis Joannès, Simo Parpola, and Nicholas Postgate for their time and generosity, which has greatly aided in the quick conversion of texts from Assur, Guzana, Kalhu, Ma'allanate, and Marqasu, all of which are now public via the ATAE pager. Without their assistance, we would still be processing this rich source material from ORC'ed PDFs.

Between April 2021 and January 2022, at LMU Munich and elsewhere, work was carried out on eleven ATAE sub-projects. The 848 Neo-Assyrian texts in the CTN 1, CTN 2, CTN 3, Edubba 10, Guzana, Ma'allanate, and Tušhan sub-projects were lemmatized by Mary Frazer, Mikko Luukko (with funding provided by LMU Munich), Willis Monroe, and Poppy Tushingham. The texts in the Guzana, Ma'allanate, Imgur-Enlil, StAT 1, and WVDOG 152 sub-projects were translated (or re-translated) into English by Mary Frazer, Poppy Tushingham, and Frauke Weiershäuser. Mikko Lukko also provided English translations for the material in CTN 1, CTN 2, and CTN 3 that had not been previously translated. In addition, two new sub-projects were created: Dur-Šarrukin and Kunalia. The former contains eight texts from Khorsabad that have been published SAA 5, SAA 6, SAA 11, and SAA 20, while the later includes only the copy of the succession treaty of Esarhaddon discovered at Tell Tayinat.

Work on ATAE is on-going and will continue as one of the short- and mid-term projects led by the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI).

Funding for the ATAE corpus project has been provided by LMU Munich, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (through the establishment of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East), and SFB 1369 "Vigilanzkulturen: Transformationen – Räume – Techniken" [https://www.sfb1369.uni-muenchen.de/] (as part of the work programme of sub-project B01 [https://www.sfb1369.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/teilprojekte/projektbereich_b/teilprojekt_b01/index.html]).

ATAE Editorial Board

ATAE Advisory Committee

ATAE Contributors

The contents of this website, except where noted below, are the copyright of the ATAE Project. They are released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

This means that you are free to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt our work without permission, under the following conditions:

You must attribute the work to the ATAE project and (if relevant) the author(s), as well as acknowledge the fact that we are funded by LMU Munich and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. We recommend the following wording: "Based on data prepared by [name of author(s)] for the LMU-Munich- and Humboldt-Foundation-funded ATAE Project" or "Based on data prepared by the LMU-Munich- and Humboldt-Foundation-funded ATAE Project". If you alter, transform, or build upon any material in this website, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. 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. For information on how to cite Oracc URLs online and in print, click here [/doc/help/visitingoracc/citingurls/].

Images taken from third-party websites are all credited and linked to those websites, where information about copyright may be found.