Astronomical Diaries Digital

This project has two principal goals. First, it will produce a digital edition of the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries. The second step consist in a computer-assisted analysis of the text corpus with methods from the field of Digital Humanities. The Astronomical Diaries are a group of Late Babylonian observational records; the majority of the tablets dates to the period between ca. 400 and 60 BCE. In addition to recording the position of the planets visible to the free eye and the path of the moon through the ecliptic, they describe a variety of terrestrial phenomena: local events as well as political history on a supra-regional level, the gauge of the Euphrates River and records of commodity prices, including the staple foods barley and dates. The Diaries are not only the most important source on various aspects of Late Babylonian history, they are likewise one of the largest collections of observed data for any period in world history before the modernera. Thepublicationof a lemmatized digital editionon ORACC (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/), complete with a historical commentary, will make this important text group available for a wider audience and further the integration of Babylonian data into contemporary historical debates. Considering the size of the corpus, which consists of more than 1,000 clay tablet and fragments, and its general coherence, a computer-aided approach to hitherto neglected questions pertaining to evolutions and heterogeneities within the corpus seems particularly promising. Areas of research include here developments in content i.e., what was observed and recorded as well as variations in orthography and vocabulary. The principal focus will be on changes over time, but also the relationship between aforementioned aspects and tablet layout will receive due consideration. The Akkadian text will be converted into a format following the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The phenomena to be analyzed will be annotated by means of a TEI-based encoding scheme, to be devised in collaboration with an IT-expert, and subsequently exported into a XML-based database. In a final step, the data gathered will be evaluated by mean of customized web applications. The interpretation of the results will allow conclusions on the internal structure of the corpus and enable us to attempt a redaction history of the corpus. By pursuing the question of how the Babylonian astronomers selected and put into writing their data, this project will also elucidate epistemic practices of scientists in antiquity.

This project achieved two principal goals. First, it produced a digital open access edition of the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries available on http://oracc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/adsd/. The Astronomical Diaries are a rather sizable group of Late Babylonian observational records, consisting of more than 1,000 clay tablet and fragments; the majority of the tablets dates to the period between ca. 400 and 60 BCE. In addition to recording the position of the planets visible to the free eye and the path of the moon through the ecliptic, they describe a variety of terrestrial phenomena: local events as well as political history on a supra-regional level, the gauge of the Euphrates River and records of commodity prices, including the staple foods barley and dates. The Diaries are not only the most important source on various aspects of Late Babylonian history, they are likewise one of the largest collections of observed data for any period in world history before the modern era. It furthermore published with a historical-philogical commentary to the historical sections of these diaries. Taken together, these efforts will make this important text group available for a wider audience and further the integration of Babylonian data into contemporary historical debates. Second, project members devised computer-aided approaches to hitherto neglected research questions relating to the corpus, pooling the respective competences of philologists and software developers. The Akkadian text was converted into XML-format and enriched with metadata (e.g. on tablet format and layout), following the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). On this new textual basis, various digital tools, such as scripts converting the Babylonian dates into dates according to the Julian-Gregorian calendar, or analyses of orthographic conventions were developed and applied to the data. The interpretation of the results allowed new insights on the internal structure of the corpus