writing in early mesopotamia project

The Writing in Early Mesopotamia (WEM) project endeavors to provide a comprehensive description of how the technology of cuneiform writing represented language. The project will investigate early cuneiform writing from the perspective of both language — how sound and meaning are systematically expressed diachronically and synchronically — and semiotics — the graphic organization and history of the symbols that comprise the system. The scope of the project is the cuneiform written record from the invention of writing in the late fourth millennium bc (ca. 3300 bc) through the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1600 bc). While Sumerian writing is at the center of the project — Sumerian being in all likelihood the language for which writing was invented in Mesopotamia — the adaptation of the script to express Semitic (Akkadian and Eblaite) and the long-term interplay between these writing systems are major concerns. The following brief report introduces this new Oriental Institute endeavor, initiated the past academic year and supported generously by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Linda Noe Laine Foundation, and the Oriental Institute’s Erica Reiner Fund. Below, we provide an overview of the WEM project and conclude with a description of our database work, which has been our primary occupation for the 2012–13 academic year. The project is currently staffed by Christopher Woods and Massimo Maiocchi (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow), Howard Farber and Steven George provided part-time assistance, and University of Chicago undergraduate and Metcalf Fellow Abigail Hoskins worked full-time on the project during the summer of 2013. Beginning this upcoming academic year (2013–14), the WEM project will collaborate closely with another new initiative at the University of Chicago concerned with early writing, the Neubauer Collegium’s Signs of Writing the Cultural, Social, and Linguistic Contexts of the World’s First Writing Systems (described under Christopher Woods’s individual research [see separate report]).