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Monday, October 20, 2008

Near Eastern Prosopography and Onomastics

Charles Helton wants a Lexicon of Greek Personal Names for Sumerian and Akkadian. What's the state of prosopographical and onomastic research in that context and the status of relevant projects (digital or otherwise)?

2 comments:

Chuck Jones said...

I think the most recent published comprehensive onomastic corpus for a single dialect of Akkadian is The Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, based on the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project database. There are a great many other recent studies, for instance John Nielsen's 2008 University of Chicago dissertation Sons and descendants : a social history of kin groups and family names in the early neo-Babylonian period.

I had a conversation last week with a colleague who was imagining a wiki-like collectively developed prosopographic resource for the Sassanian empire. Does such a thing exist for any corpus of names?

Anonymous said...

Chuck, to my knowledge a wiki for names doesn't exist. However, I think it is an absolutely fantastic idea. CDLI has a very nice wiki-like deal that has year names and stuff--it would be great if something like this were done for names. Furthermore, if there was a central database for names covering more or less all dialects and periods that would be very helpful.