Old Assyrian Research Environment (OARE)
Edward Stratford, Associate Professor, Brigham Young University; Director
OARE encodes the Old Assyrian texts, principally from Kültepe, but also from Boğazköy, Acemhöyuk, and Qal’at Sherqat. The primary objective is to render the texts in a way that indexes descriptions of persons, places, assets, transactions, dates in the documents, and then provides curated indexes of such persons, places, assets, transactions, etc. The project also is developing a lexicon with extensive links to the texts and basic archaeological context for the tablets.
OCHRE’s structure for digitally encoding texts provides an unsurpassed archival framework that allows not only transliterations, but the capacity to articulate the linguistic structure of texts and mark up small and large word groupings (phrases, clauses, topics, etc.). This capability within OCHRE provides a unique opportunity to mark up descriptions of past actors and events with a high level of precision, to form the basis for a database of economic data that is embedded in a philologically robust structure.
Photo courtesy Klaus Wagensonner. Tablets from Yale Babylonian Collection and Nies Babylonian Collection.