Overview of Standards

RINAP will follow the basic methodology developed and used successfully by the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) Project during the course of its existence. Advances in the computerization, digitization, and online presentation of Mesopotamian texts over the past decade will allow the project to present its material both in print and online, and will permit more detailed indexing of the inscriptions, including lemmatization of the Akkadian and Sumerian words appearing in the texts. Thus, easy access to these official Assyrian inscriptions and the information in them is available to a wide scholarly and general audience.

The authors of the manuscripts were chosen for their expertise in editing late Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions. The basic methodology used in editing the texts was thoroughly discussed at a series of workshops involving a select group of international scholars at the University of Toronto between 1979 and 1982. The last of these gatherings saw the group formally constituted as the Editorial Board of the RIM Project. Out of these meetings grew the whole structure of that project and a detailed document, the Editorial Manual, in which the research methods and plans were laid down. RIM's Editorial Manual was the product of a consensus of expert opinion and not the subjective rules of any one scholar. That document serves as a basic guideline for the RINAP Project.

To ensure accuracy of the editions, all sources are collated from the originals when possible. In addition, each volume is reviewed by three independent assessors; the reviewers are chosen by the RINAP Editorial Board, in consultation with the book's author(s), on the basis of the assessors' scholarly expertise. After incorporating the assessors' comments into the manuscripts, the books are then reviewed by the members of the Editorial Board. Thus, any volume published by the RINAP Project is subjected to a rigorous review process before publication.

Following standard Assyriological practice, the system of sign values in Borger, Mesopotamisches Zeichenlexikon, is generally followed in the transliterations for both the print and online editions. The print and online editions, the online glossaries, and the online index of names conform to the standards of the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/index.html] (Oracc), which is the creation of Steve Tinney, and which is steered by Eleanor Robson, Tinney, and Niek Veldhuis. Click on the following links for information on Oracc's transliteration conventions for Akkadian [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/languages/akkadian/index.html], Oracc's guidelines on Akkadian and Sumerian lemmatization [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/lemmatising/index.html], using the glossaries [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/visitingoracc/glossaries/index.html], and using [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/visitingoracc/index.html] and searching [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/search/index.html] the corpora.

Jamie Novotny

Jamie Novotny, 'Overview of Standards', The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, The RINAP Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/abouttheproject/overviewofstandards/]

 
Back to top ^^
 
© RINAP online, 2011–. The RINAP Project is based at the University of Pennsylvania and the contents of this website have been made possible in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor (2008–20), as well as funding provided by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Historisches Seminar – Abteilung Alte Geschichte; 2015–23), through the establishment of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East for Karen Radner, and by the Gerda Henkel Foundation (2019–22). Content released under a CC BY-SA 3.0 [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/] license, 2007-23.
Oracc uses cookies only to collect Google Analytics data. Read more here [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/about/cookies/index.html]; see the stats here [http://www.seethestats.com/site/oracc.museum.upenn.edu]; opt out here.
http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/abouttheproject/overviewofstandards/