Achive.org Digitized Works
Mar 12, 2010 18:59:04 GMT -5
Post by us4-he2-gal2 on Mar 12, 2010 18:59:04 GMT -5
Thread Orientation: On this thread we reference and document some of the many early Assyriological works which have been made available in digital format on the website Archive.org
I am interested in making this excellent resource more visiable to all enenuru members out there - archive.org has been referred to previously but is important enough in my mind to stress here. I have recently been reading about early oriental scholars, some of whom were quite limited in their options due to the scarcity or extreme expense of books which treated eastern languages an writing in any detail - sometimes important libraries were on the far end of Europe; other times, important and rare books would be jealously removed from distribution in order to retain scholarly iniative. We should consider ourselves blessed to be in the digital age, when field changing volumes are just a click away on sites such as Archive.org. As anyone browsing the site will find, many early Assyriological works are available on this site and often from the legends and pioneers of the field - of course while this is an excellent chance to see some of the building blocks of Assyriology, rare books in many cases, on must always bear in mind that the science is never the less often outdated in these works so use carefully.
In order to new comers an idea of the use of these digitalized books, I will make an example here. Let's say that you were reading a technical explanation of the evolution of this or that cuneiform word, and the author makes reference to something like this: "réc 25". Or, "this word was originally written with the sign réc 25". What is réc 25 and how do I see what it looks like? More than likely such references are to works of pioneering scholars who mapped out cuneiform signs in the early stages of Assyriology - thus an old work you may find on archive.org.
The first thing you need to realize is that réc is more than likely an abbreviation - You should there go here, to CDLI's abbreviation guide. It's all alphabetic, so scroll down to your abbreviation. For réc we get:
REC : F. Thureau-Dangin, Recheres sur l'origine de l'Écriture Cunéiforme (ParIs 1898); SuppIément (1899)
Now we know that réc refers to the book "Recheres sur l'origine de l'Écriture Cunéiforme" by Thureau-Dangin. So for réc 25, the author wants us to get that book, and find sign #25 - then we can see what he means. Do you have this book? Probably not along with 99.9999% of the world. So, barring immiediate access to a large university library, we could go to archive.org.
Once at archive.org, go to the search bar and copy in the name of the book. You'll probably notice that didn't work.. and of course, especially with foreign language titles, you should be prepared to search by author name and perhaps also ISBN. If none of these techniques yields a result they may not have it. However, if you find what your looking for, there is often many options on how to obtain the information, from pdf to plain txt document, and also an excellent and easy to use online flip book format.
To follow: I will begin cataloging some of the Assyriological resources immiediately available for download on Archive.org
Archive.org
I am interested in making this excellent resource more visiable to all enenuru members out there - archive.org has been referred to previously but is important enough in my mind to stress here. I have recently been reading about early oriental scholars, some of whom were quite limited in their options due to the scarcity or extreme expense of books which treated eastern languages an writing in any detail - sometimes important libraries were on the far end of Europe; other times, important and rare books would be jealously removed from distribution in order to retain scholarly iniative. We should consider ourselves blessed to be in the digital age, when field changing volumes are just a click away on sites such as Archive.org. As anyone browsing the site will find, many early Assyriological works are available on this site and often from the legends and pioneers of the field - of course while this is an excellent chance to see some of the building blocks of Assyriology, rare books in many cases, on must always bear in mind that the science is never the less often outdated in these works so use carefully.
In order to new comers an idea of the use of these digitalized books, I will make an example here. Let's say that you were reading a technical explanation of the evolution of this or that cuneiform word, and the author makes reference to something like this: "réc 25". Or, "this word was originally written with the sign réc 25". What is réc 25 and how do I see what it looks like? More than likely such references are to works of pioneering scholars who mapped out cuneiform signs in the early stages of Assyriology - thus an old work you may find on archive.org.
The first thing you need to realize is that réc is more than likely an abbreviation - You should there go here, to CDLI's abbreviation guide. It's all alphabetic, so scroll down to your abbreviation. For réc we get:
REC : F. Thureau-Dangin, Recheres sur l'origine de l'Écriture Cunéiforme (ParIs 1898); SuppIément (1899)
Now we know that réc refers to the book "Recheres sur l'origine de l'Écriture Cunéiforme" by Thureau-Dangin. So for réc 25, the author wants us to get that book, and find sign #25 - then we can see what he means. Do you have this book? Probably not along with 99.9999% of the world. So, barring immiediate access to a large university library, we could go to archive.org.
Once at archive.org, go to the search bar and copy in the name of the book. You'll probably notice that didn't work.. and of course, especially with foreign language titles, you should be prepared to search by author name and perhaps also ISBN. If none of these techniques yields a result they may not have it. However, if you find what your looking for, there is often many options on how to obtain the information, from pdf to plain txt document, and also an excellent and easy to use online flip book format.
To follow: I will begin cataloging some of the Assyriological resources immiediately available for download on Archive.org