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State Archives of Assyria Online (SAAo)

State Archives of Assyria (SAA) [http://assyriologia.fi/natcp/saa/] provides editions of texts from the Neo-Assyrian period, organized by genre: administrative letters, administrative records, astrological reports, court poetry, decrees, extispicy queries to the sun-god, grants, legal transactions of the royal court, priestly letters, prophecies, royal ritual, scholarly letters, treaties and loyalty oaths, and votive donations. Since 1987, the University-of-Helsinki-based Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project (NATCP) [http://www.helsinki.fi/science/saa/], which was founded and directed by Simo Parpola, has published twenty-one of its twenty-two planned volumes, as well as over forty other books in its supplemental series State Archives of Assyria Studies (SAAS) [http://assyriologia.fi/natcp/saas/] and State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts (SAACT) [http://assyriologia.fi/natcp/saact/].

The 5056 Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian texts published in the SAA series, as well as in one volume of SAAS (volume 2), primarily originate from British excavations carried out in the citadel of Nineveh (modern Kuyunjik) between 1850 and 1905 and those conducted at Calah (modern Nimrud) in the early 1950s, and, therefore, most of them are now housed in the British Museum in London; some are presently in the Iraq Museum (Baghdad).

In 2005, at a time when many of the SAA volumes were out of print or difficult to get hold of, longtime NATCP member Karen Radner (then UCL, now LMU Munich) sought out ways of making NATCP's rich and varied heritage data accessible to a wider audience. In collaboration with Eleanor Robson (then University of Cambridge, now UCL) and Steve Tinney (University of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), this led to the creation of State Archives of Assyria online (SAAo), with the first parts of the dataset available from 2007 and 2009 via the open-access web resources Knowledge and Power [/saao/knpp/] and Assyrian Empire Builders [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/sargon/].

The aim of SAAo, which has been part of the LMU-Munich-based Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative [https://www.en.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/research/mocci/index.html] (MOCCI; directed by Karen Radner and Jamie Novotny) since August 2015, is to make the 5056 Neo-Assyrian texts published in the State Archives of Assyria Series available online for free in a fully searchable and richly annotated (lemmatised) format, as well as to widely disseminate, facilitate, and promote the active use of these important cuneiform sources in academia and beyond.

SAAo and MOCCI's electronic text editions are implemented with and hosted on the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC; http://oracc.org [http://oracc.org]).

For further details, see the "About the Project" page.


Website Structure

In addition to the complete, fully searchable and lemmatised SAAo corpus [/saao/pager/], this website comprises twenty-four sub-projects, including two digital resources that contextualise the rich Neo-Assyrian sources from Nineveh and Nimrud in their historical and cultural contexts. The SAAo sub-projects are:


Current Sponsors

Since August 2015, SAAo has been part of the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative [https://www.en.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/research/mocci/index.html] (MOCCI), which is based at and supported by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München [https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/index.html]. Between 2015 and 2020, work on SAAo was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation [https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/home.html] through funds provided to LMU's Alexander von Humboldt Chair of the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East [https://www.en.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/chairs/chair_radner/staff_radner/index.html].

For further details, see the "About the Project" page.

 
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SAAo, 2014-. Since 2015, SAAo is based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Historisches Seminar (LMU Munich, History Department) - Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East. Content released under a CC BY-SA 3.0 [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/] license, 2007-20.
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