Cybernetica Mesopotamica
Linguistic Analysis of Akkadian

Aims

The project Back to top Support Back to top The sound of silence      The written texts are the most explicit signature which the ancient Mesopotamians have placed on their history. Through them, we learn their names, the names they gave to the world around them, and even their inner thoughts and feelings. For over a century anda half now, both the script and the languages of Mesopotamia have been “decyphered,” but there are still many questions open. For one thing, there are matters of nuance and style; for another, there are new bodies of evidence and to some extent new languages which are being discovered, such as the texts of Ebla in the last two decades.      We have by now millions of sign occurrences which are stored in the data banks of our projects, including texts from Babylon and Mari, Ebla and Ugarit, Assur, Nuzi and several other sites. The same pattern of distributional analysis which obtains for the artifactual evidence, lies at the basis of our understanding of the texts. The very concept of grammar is originally a linguistic concept, and we have refined it using the insight of structural and generative linguistic theory as applicable especially to Akkadian. Hence, our encoding manual turned out to be a new venture in grammatical studies. On the one hand, the systemic structure perceived in the language was controlled and verified by the inherent logic of data processing. On the other hand, the substantive arguments could be proven or disproven on the strength of the data base which was being experimentally codified as the system itself grew.      Short of speech simulation, we are teaching the computer to speak Akkadian, the main Semitic language of Mesopotamia, in two ways. One is interactive: the computer generates the morphological analysis of forms provided as input. The main function of this program is paedagogical: building on its own “understanding” of grammatical forms, the computer quizzes the user at a variety of different levels. Since the forms are generated entirely from rules given as program statements (and not from tables), a study of the programs is in itself a very compact study of the linguistic code of Akkadian. We view this as an important development within the context of the growing trend toward genuine computer literacy.      The other linguistic use of the computer is to provide a fully articulated documentary basis for specific corpora of Mesopotamian texts. The most intriguing group of texts are those of Ebla, the major royal archive of a third millennium city in Syria. Our project serves as the official channel for the computerization of these texts in collaboration with the University of Rome and within the framework of an international Committee which is responsible for the research and publication of the documents from this archive. Back to top The higher nodes      The processing of the data as carried out so far for publication has yielded extensive sorts based on set clusters of variables. They are basically concordances and indices, built on a totally new categorization system, and with a number of frequency computations on which some preliminary statistical analysis can be performed. All of these outputs are viewed as interconnected components of a larger whole, and their variety adds up to an overall picture that is indeed larger than the sum of its parts.      Projected for the immediate future is a more explicit analytical effort, where the interconnections are made explicit, and their significance is properly assessed. The distinction made in our publication prospectus between categorization and analysis reflects this basic understanding of our research goals. Categorization deals with the lower nodes of the binary tree which may be used to represent the Mesopotamian cultural system. Analysis deals with the higher nodes in the sense that it establishes multiple connections among all possible branches in the system. Having properly categorized the data in the first place, and having a vast data base accessible, suitable programming will allow us to see distributional patterns of a type which could not even be imagined heretofore.      As both a new categorization system and a new scholarly attitude toward the documentary effort come to prevail, the conceptual impact of the new technology will indeed go beyond the level of simply performing traditional operations with greater ease: it will affect the very scaffolding and the structure of research. NISABA was the Mesopotamian goddess of writing under whose tutelage the Mesopotamian scribes wrought the intellectual revolution which projected our inner brain functions onto the extrasomatic medium of clay. Some 5000 years later, time has come to go from clay to chips and boards. Nisaba will not mind: we are recovering the past evidence of her art better than her own scribes ever could!