Updates:

24 October 2006

Site updated with minor revisions.

31 August 2006

Funding for the ETCSL project came to an end.

1 March 2006

Eleven compositions have been added to the corpus, completing the publication of what is referred to as Letter Collection B (based on the compendium tablet UM 29-16-139 +):

• Letter from Lugal-nesaĝe to a king radiant as the moon (ETCSL 3.3.02 = B7),
• Letter from Lugal-nesaĝe to a king radiant as the sun (3.3.03 = B8),
• Letter from Ur-Enlila to a governor and temple administrator (3.3.04 = B10),
• Letter from a governor and temple administrator to a king (3.3.05 = B11),
• Letter from Aba-taḫ-lugalĝa to his brothers (3.3.06 = B13),
• Letter from Ugubi to his mother (3.3.07 = B14),
• Letter from Šamaš-ṭāb to Ilak-ni'id (3.3.08 = B15),
• Letter from Lugal-nesaĝe to Enlil-massu (3.3.09 = B16),
• Letter from Inim-Inana to Enlil-massu (3.3.11 = B19),
• Letter from Inim-Inana to Lugal-ibila (3.3.12 = B20), and
• Public announcement of the loss of a seal (5.7.a = B12).

The compositions from Collection B published previously at the website are:

• The history of the Tummal (2.1.3 = B9),
• Letter from Aba-indasa to Šulgi about his neglect (3.1.21 = B1),
• Letter from Sîn-illat to Iddin-Dagan about confronting the Martu (3.2.01 = B2),
• Letter from Iddin-Dagan to Sîn-illat about the troops (3.2.02 = B3),
• Letter from Nanna-ki-aĝ to Lipit-Eštar about Gungunum's troops (3.2.03 = B4),
• Letter from Lipit-Eštar to Nanna-ki-aĝ about driving away the enemy (3.2.04 = B5),
• Letter from Ur-saga to a king fearing the loss of his father's household (3.3.01 = B6),
• Letter from Inanaka to the goddess Nintinuga (3.3.10 = B17), and
• A dog for Nintinuga (5.7.2 = B18).

Letter Collection B can be searched as a subset of the corpus by making the appropriate selection (LCB) in the category field in the advanced search interface.

22 November 2005

An improved paragraph-aligned view of the original and the translation has been introduced. See Using ETCSL, Introduction for details. The default font type for all pages is now sans-serif. The layout of the advanced search page and the translations have changed slightly.

11 July 2005

Black, Jeremy A. and Gábor G. Zólyomi (eds.). Special Volume in Honor of Professor Mamoru Yoshikawa, I. The Study of Diachronic and Synchronic Variation in Sumerian: Papers Presented at the 6th Meeting of the Sumerian Grammar Discussion Group, Oxford, 17th and 18th September 1999. (Acta Sumerologica 22 [2000]) Hiroshima: The Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan.

30 June 2005

Three further compositions have been published at the website: Dumuzid and his sisters (c.1.4.1.3), Letter from Inanaka to the goddess Nintinuga (c.3.3.10), and Letter from Inim-Enlila to a king (c.3.3.27). The corpus is now 100% disambiguated; as part of the harmonisation of readings rig₅ has been changed to de₅ 'to collect'. A feedback form has been attached to selected pages to encourage comments and suggestions related especially to transliterations and the readings of signs.

30 March 2005

The lemmatised corpus is published along with glossary, sign list and lemma-based searching facility. The process of lemmatising the corpus is described in ETCSLlemmatisation.

21 March 2005

A list of publications arising from the project is published at the website. See ETCSLpublications.

24 February 2005

The corpus is 99% disambiguated.

25 November 2004

New book: The Literature of Ancient Sumer. Edited by Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, and Gábor Zólyomi. Oxford University Press.

1 November 2004

The corpus is lemmatised. All recognisable word forms have been associated with one (or more) lexeme(s) and given one (or more) wordclass label(s) and English gloss(es).

1 September 2004

The URL for the corpus has changed to http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/ to be in line with the rest of the faculty.

18 May 2004

The tragic loss of Dr Jeremy Black, the ETCSL's project director, will obviously have an impact on the running of the project and its research goals. However, the website and the ETCSL corpus will continue to be online and regularly updated.

2 April 2004

After extensive proofreading and standardisation of transliteration values, we are now in the process of lemmatising the corpus. Lemmatising entails subsuming every word form under a citation form, which will greatly help in searching and in performing all kinds of statistical analysis of the corpus. As part of the lemmatisation process we will also introduce part-of-speech information and English labels (see below). This work is estimated to take several months. The initial, automatic lemmatisation was done by Steve Tinney using his suite of programs, for which we are extremely grateful.

(Gudea, 611-612)
<w form="iri-na" lemma="iri" pos="N" label="city">iri-na</w>
<w form="&jic;asal2" lemma="asal2" pos="N" label="poplar" det="&jic;">&jic;asal2</w>
<w form="dug3-bi" lemma="dug3" pos="V" label="to be good">dug3-bi</w>
<w form="mu-du3" lemma="du3" pos="V" label="to build">mu-du3</w>
<w form="jissu-bi" lemma="jissu" pos="N" label="shade">jissu-bi</w>
<w form="mu-la2" lemma="la2" pos="V" label="to stretch out">mu-la2</w>