This page includes a few helpful links to external resources and research tools related to ANE and Semitic studies. It is not intended as a comprehensive collection of all such resources available freely online. Rather, these are a few of the sites that I periodically (or for some, frequently) peruse as relevant resources for my research.
Ancient World Online – AWOL, the successor of Abzu, is the project of Charles E. Jones (formerly of ISAW at NYU, currently at Penn State University). It brings together, in a series of blog posts, open access material related to the ancient world as well as other related material. See especially its List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies, Alphabetical List of Open Access Monograph Series in Ancient Studies, and Open Access Ancient Language Textbooks, OERs, and Primers.
Aramaic Studies – Aramaic Studies is the leading journal for Aramaic language and literature of all periods and regions. Edited by Aaron Michael Butts and published by Brill, this journal is highly recommended.
Currents in Biblical Research – CBR is a journal by Sage Publishing which “summarizes the spectrum of recent research on particular topics or biblical books.” Sage Journals also hosts a number of journals in other subjects and disciplines, e.g. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, The Medieval History Journal, and Abstracts in Anthropology.
Ebla Digital Archives – EbDA is a project of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in collaboration with Cnr – ISMed which aims to provide a digital edition of the entire corpus of Ebla texts.
Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires – NABU is an Open Access journal of the Société pour l’étude du Proche-Orient ancien (SÉPOA). The journal is published quarterly in March, June, September, and December. The current and previous volumes of NABU can be accessed freely here.
Old Testament Abstracts – OTA is a journal edited by Christopher Begg and published by The Catholic University of America Press. It “features abstracts for journal articles, monographs, multi-author works and software related to Old Testament studies” which are “organized by themes such as the Ancient Near East, literary forms, and biblical theology.” It can be accessed through Project Muse.
Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus – ORACC is a “collaborative effort to develop a complete corpus of cuneiform whose rich annotation and open licensing support the next generation of scholarly research.” It was created by Steven Tinney and is steered by Tinney, Jamie Novotny, Eleanor Robson, and Niek Veldhuis. The texts are divided into Projects, such as on Astronomical Diaries Digital (ADsD) and the Archival Texts of the Assyrian Empire (ATAE). I personally recommend browsing the Akkadian of the Eastern Mediterranean World (AEMW) directed by Jacob Lauinger and Matthew Rutz.
Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island in Egypt – Funded by an ERC Grant (Project Number 637692 from 2015-2022; Project Acronym ‘Elephantine’), this project makes publicly available in an open access online research database all the several thousand papyri and other manuscripts from Elephantine scattered in more than 60 institutions across 24 countries. According to the project, “Their texts are written in ten different languages and scripts, including Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic and Arabic. 80% of these manuscripts were unpublished or unstudied before.” Now, “More than 10.000 objects (papyri, ostraca, parchment, paper etc.) could be studied and included into the newly created database.”
Other Links:
- Beta maṣāḥəft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea
- Beyond Influence: The Connected Histories of Ethiopic and Syriac Christianity
- CDLI’s 100 Most Important Cuneiform Objects
- CDLI’s Bibliographic Tools, including Abbreviations for Assyriology, Recent Publications in Assyriology, and Bibliography of Sumerian Literature
- CDLI’s Cuneiform Collections
- CDLI’s Who’s Who in Cuneiform Studies
- TEXTEVOLVE – This project studies the Aramaic Targums. Per the website, “How did the text of the Targums evolve over time and why? TEXTEVOLVE will develop a new methodology, called Evolutionary Philology, that is capable of addressing this core question. It will use techniques from evolutionary biology that have not previously been applied to texts to achieve this. This will have implications across disciplines that work with historical texts.”