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Press release
The earliest true scripts in man's history now available on Internet | |||
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Paris, January 10, 2003 |
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earliest true scripts in man's history, found on thousands of cuneiform
tablets from ancient Babylonia, are now directly available on Internet within
the framework of a program known as the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
(CDLI). The CNRS has participated in this international project, directed
by the University of California in Los Angeles and the Max Planck Institute
for the History of Science in Berlin. The purpose of the CDLI (http://cdli.ucla.edu) is to create a "virtual museum" on Internet, making it possible to access all of the scripts written during the first 1,500 years of the beginning of writing and found in the Near East, the region where the oldest writing system known appeared at the end of the fourth millennium B.C.: cuneiform script. The digitalized reproductions and the contents of these cuneiform tablets, as well as the different integrated research tools, will be made available to Assyriologists, historians and the public. As of June 2002, Bertrand Lafont(1), CNRS Research Director at the Laboratory of Archeology and Sciences of Ancient History , assisted by Jacob Dahl (CDLI-UCLA), began to digitize the collection of several hundred cuneiform tablets kept at the Institut Catholique de Paris (ICP), upgrading the cataloging, transliteration(2) and indexing work done on these texts, using the procedures and methods developed by the CDLI (http://cdli.ucla.edu/cdli_methods.html). These digital resources, accompanied by introductory texts, have just been put on the Internet and are available to the public in French at the following address: http://cdli.ucla.edu/links/icp_fr.html. This work will continue in France with the collections of the Collège de France, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (EPHE, Paris), the Louvre Museum and other French collections. The creation of this digitalized library should give impetus to scientific research into the contents of these thousands of texts, found today in museums and collections throughout the world, and increase our knowledge about the civilization that produced them, its language and its organization. From a more general point of view, this project aims at shedding light on one of the greatest cultural heritages of the history of humanity. (1)Bertrand Lafond does his research with the "Cuneiform History and Eastern Archeology" team within the mixed research unit, "Archeology and Sciences of Ancient History" (CNRS, Université de Paris 1 and Paris 10) http://web.mae.u-paris10.fr/recherche/arscan.htm (2)That is, the transcription of the cuneiform writing system into our own alphabet.
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