Using the Corpus of Ancient Mesopotamian Scholarship

These pages explain how to browse, sort, and search the Corpus of Ancient Mesopotamian Scholarship (CAMS), and how to use the associated glossaries. Unless otherwise noted, the compositions transliterated and translated for the corpus have been prepared by members of the GKAB project with acknowledgement of primary and secondary sources used. Copyright lies with the GKAB project. They may not be reproduced for non-educational purposes, beyond fair use, without the permission of the GKAB project.

You may find it helpful to print this page out for reference before you start to explore CAMS for the first time. If your browser has problems displaying all the special transliteration characters you may want to download and install Steve Tinney's Ungkam font [http://cdl.museum.upenn.edu/fonts.html] for Mac, Windows, or Linux.

Browse or search the CAMS corpus

Page View (corpus browser)

The screen is divided into two unequal halves. There is a sidebar on the left, and a full listing of the corpus on the right.

On the right, the tablets are listed by a short, standardised designation, based on their place of publication, and grouped by period, genre, and provenance. There are 25 records per page. Left and right arrows at the top and bottom of the page enable you to move through the listing. You can also jump to another page by typing the page number in the box at the top centre.

The "CDLI" button on the left-hand side of each entry takes you to the relevant entry in the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative's [http://cdli.ucla.edu] database (external link). Designation (publication numbers, in blue) link to the Item View, which displays the transliteration and translation of a single tablet. The central two columns list the genre and subgenre or standard composition to which the tablet belongs, while the final column gives the library from which it originates.

The left-hand sidebar is divided into five horizontal zones by four red lines:

The top two links take you back to the GKAB website or allow you to start a fresh search.
Beneath the second red line are links to the Akkadian, Sumerian and proper name glossaries.
The tools in the fourth section allow you to search the CAMS corpus and to sort your findings (or the entire corpus) by any combination of period, genre, and provenance.
The lowest, longest part of the sidebar gives an outline view of the corpus, or the found set of records, grouped by period, genre, and provenance as specified in the search box above. It shows the number of found records in each category and allows you to zoom in on a subset of records by clicking on any blue word. To unzoom back to your found set, click on UNZOOM at the top or bottom of the resulting text listing. To move from one subset to another, click on the up and down arrows either side of ZOOM at the top or bottom of the text listing.

Browse or search the CAMS corpus

Item View (single tablets or composite texts)

The Item View shows the transliteration and translation of a single tablet or composite text. Place the cursor over any word of the transliteration to see its outline glossary entry, and click on the word to go to its full glossary entry. If the line numbers of the transliteration are shown in blue, you can click them to view an associated tablet or composite text.

The left-hand sidebar gives the following information:

Numbers: CDLI [http://cdli.ucla.edu] catalogue number (external link);
museum number;
excavation number
Views: (there are currently no other views available)
Details: period;
provenance;
genre;
either the subgenre or the standard composition to which the tablet belongs
Bibliography: short references to relevant secondary literature

To hide or unhide the left-hand sidebar, click [fullscreen] or [splitscreen] at the top of the page.

Browse or search the CAMS corpus

Searching for sign sequences and catalogue data

You can use the search box at the top left of the Page View and Item View to search within the transliterations and/or within the catalogue data. However, searching for Akkadian, Sumerian, and English words is best done within the glossaries.

To search within the transliterations, type the sequence of signs you want to find into the search box and click "Search". The lines containing that sequence will be displayed in the right hand part of the screen, with the relevant word highlighted. Click on the blue designation to the right to see the Item View of each tablet or composite text found. Place the cursor over a word to see its outline glossary entry, and click on the world to go to its full glossary entry. You can sort the found records by genre, period, and provenance as described for Page View. Click the [?] button at top left of the main frame for detailed help on searching transliterations.

To search within the catalogue data, type into the search box a comma and a space (i.e., ", ") followed by words or dates you want to find - e.g., ", commentary". Then click "Select Texts" or press return. The search engine is not case-sensitive.

Here are some hints for more efficient catalogue searching:

Instead of the characters š, ş, and ţ use the sequences sz, s,, and t, respectively - e.g., ", Marduk-szumu-us,ur".
There are no long vowels in the catalogue data: just use normal vowel characters.
To search for multi-word phrases, separate the words with an underscore - e.g., ", STT_1_015".
You can use the wildcard character *. For instance, ", Nabu-*" will find all occurrences in the catalogue date of names beginning with Nabu. For more help with wildcards, click [?] to the top right of the search box.

You can restrict your catalogue searches to the following fields, by entering the field name followed by a colon and then what you are searching for, with no space between:

Designation - e.g., ", designation:CTN_4,_117"
CDLI catalogue number - e.g., ", id_text:p363531"
Museum collection - e.g., ", owner:National_Museum_of_Iraq"
Museum number - e.g., ", museum_no:IM_067576"
Joins - e.g., ", join_information:VAT_07828"

Genre - e.g., ", genre:medical"
One or more words (in sequence) of the subgenre (including composition names), e.g, ", subgenre:medical_recipe"
Presence of colophon - e.g., ", text_remarks:colophon"
Language - e.g., ", language:bilingual"

Period - e.g., ", period:Neo-Assyrian"
Ancient date, as recorded on the tablet - e.g., ", date_of_origin:SE_061" (where SE = Seleucid Era)
Date BC, as calculated from ancient date - e.g., ", date_remarks:250_BC"

Provenance - e.g., ", provenience:Kalhu" (note US spelling)
Findspot square (for Uruk tablets) - e.g., ", Ue_XVIII_1"
Excavation number - e.g, ", excavation_no:ND_4404"
Excavation season - e.g., ", provenience_remarks:1985-6" (note US spelling)
Library - e.g., ", findspot_remarks:Ezida"

Browse or search the CAMS corpus [http://cdl.museum.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/cdlpager?caller=gkab;project=cams]

Printing

When you print a page, either in Page View or in Item View, the left-hand sidebar containing the search box and catalogue data is omitted.

Browse or search the CAMS corpus

Eleanor Robson

Eleanor Robson, 'Using the Corpus of Ancient Mesopotamian Scholarship', The Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia, The GKAB Project, [http://cdl.museum.upenn.edu/gkab/usingthecamscorpus/]