Abstract: The Ras Shamra Tablet Inventory, a textual and archaeological research project in the OCHRE database environment
By Miller Prosser, University of Chicago
American Oriental Society Meeting 2017
Saturday March 18th afternoon - ANE IV, Bunker Hill Room
Omni Hotel, California Plaza, 251 South Olive Street, Los Angeles
The Ras Shamra Tablet Inventory (RSTI) seeks to create a digital repository for textual and archaeological research on ancient Ugarit, including both legacy and new data. The project, co-directed by Dennis Pardee and Miller Prosser, pursues various research goals. First and foremost is the creation of a textual database of all of the texts from Ugarit, regardless of language or writing system. Texts are atomized down to individual signs, which are validated against project sign lists. Signs are combined into words that are organized in a glossary. Glossary items are organized by grammatical forms and attested forms. Personal names in texts are analyzed for prosopographic information, serving as the basis for social network analysis. Tablet photos are hotspotted with wedge outlines for epigraphic analysis, from which one may generate epigraphic letter charts by genre and other criteria. All tablets and other inscribed objects are organized into spatial hierarchies representing archaeological find spots. Geo-spatial references of find spots and inscribed objects can be plotted on a regional map, an excavation plan, or any other geo-referenced base map.
RSTI uses the OCHRE database environment to address this wide range of research goals. Now with a decade of intensive use and continuing development, OCHRE (the Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment) has proven to be a powerful and flexible database environment for research on textual corpora in various languages and writing systems.