Recovering cultural heritage in Iraq

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Recovering cultural heritage in Iraq
Recovering and preserving world cultural heritage.
US Air Force Senior Master Sgt. Roberto Pineiro
displays 4600-year-old statue returned to the
Iraq Museum (from 10 May article in the LA Times).
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CDLI 1
The NSF-funded Cuneiform Digital Library
Initiative and its American, European and Asian
collaborators are partners in the electronic
recovery and networked publication of ancient
archives documenting 3000 years of Babylonian
cultural and intel-lectual history.
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CDLI 2
UCLA staff of the CDLI are currently writing and
placing in the public domain a series of articles
describing the social and technological history
of ancient Iraq, its languages and writing
systems, and the role its intellectual traditions
have played in the development of Western
Civilization, from the story of the great flood
to early medicine and Euclidean geometry.
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CDLI 3
Web servers on UCLA campus, with mirror at the
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,
Berlin, and planned for Sydney and Beijing,
contain the raw data (currently ca. 500 GB) and
the web site of the project. Meta-data, text
images in raster and scalable vector graphic
format, and text con-tent will be supplemented in
the near future with automa-tic translation and
other elec-tronic tools to assist in both textual
analysis and the en-forcement of international
export laws.
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CDLI 5
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Numerical constituents
CDLI is establishing standard text entry and
numerical conventions as a tool for the history
of the concept of number
Formal Constituents Unit an element of measure,
e.g., sila3, gur, etc. Count an means of
expressing 1 or more of a Unit. Value an a single
combination of COUNT and UNIT. Ancient
Equivalency Value (AEV) an an ancient equivalency
VALUE, e.g., 5000 sila3 a property of either
UNIT, VALUE or AMOUNT. Modern Equivalency Value
(MEV) an a modern equivalency VALUE, e.g., 1
liter a property of either UNIT, VALUE or
AMOUNT. System an a definitional collection of
UNITs, COUNTs, VALUEs, AEVs and MEVs which may
optionally be an localized in time and/or place
and/or by keyword. Quantity an a complete
sequence of VALUEs expressed in a given
SYSTEM. Commodity an the counted referent of an
AMOUNT
Source http//inanna.museum.upenn.edu/cdli/num/in
dex.html
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CDLI DTD 1
lt!--  This DTD defines an object type which
requires its  own XML namespace.  CDLI objects
should have namespaces  rooted in a common
absolute URL, followed by a type,  optionally
followed by a version (the versioning is  an
emerging and still-discussed practice it is
not  an indicator of minor change, but a buffer
against  future incompatible changes).  --gt   lt!E
NTITY cdli-text-ns   "xmlns       CDATA FIXED
'http//cdli.ucla.edu/text/1'    xmlnscdli 
CDATA FIXED 'http//cdli.ucla.edu/text/1'   
xmlnsd     CDATA FIXED 'http//psd.museum.upenn.
edu/debug/1'"gt   lt!--  A convenience wrapper for
having files with more  than one text archival
files should only contain one  text, in a file
whose name is the P-ID.  --gt lt!ELEMENT texts    
(text)gt   lt!--   TEXT is the basic data object
type in the CDLI corpus.
The DTD of the CDLI (see http//cdli.ucla.
edu/cdli_ methods.html)
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CDLI DTD 2
lt?xml version"1.0" encoding"utf-8"?gt lttext
xmlns"http//cdli.ucla.edu/text/1"
id"P100028"gt ltobject type"tablet"
id"P100027.1"gt ltsurface type"obverse"
id"P100027.1.1"gt ltcolumn n"0"
id"P100027.1.1.1"gt ltl dline"3" n"1" o"1"
l"O0001" id"P100027.1.1.1.1"gt ltngtltwgtltggt1(disz)lt/
ggtlt/wgtlt/ngt ltwgtltggtud5lt/ggtlt/wgt ltwgtltg
breakage"missing"gtxlt/ggtlt/wgtlt/lgt ltl dline"4"
n"2" o"2" l"O0002" id"P100027.1.1.1.2"gt ltwgtltggt
alt/ggtltggtkallt/ggtltggtlalt/ggtlt/wgtlt/lgt ltl dline"5"
n"3" o"3" l"O0003" id"P100027.1.1.1.3"gt ltwgtltggt
mult/ggtltggtDUlt/ggtlt/wgtlt/lgt lt/columngt lt/surfacegt lt/o
bjectgt lt/textgt
Partial XML markup of an Ur III text describing
the delivery of a goat (sign transliterations are
in blue translation "1 jenny goat delivered by
Akala, for Shara of KIAN, in the month sowing").
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Returned text
In a second example, the text to the left, sold
in London in the early 90s, was, using CDLI
files, identified as a tablet looted from a
southern Iraq museum during the Shiite uprising,
and has been returned to the Iraq Museum.
Tablet obverse 1.A. 1(N01) , NINDA21(N01)
1.B. 1(N05) , 2.A. 1(N01) , 1(N39A)
2.B. 1(N42A) , 3.A. 2(N01) , 1(N24)
3.B. 1(N42A) , 4.A. 6(N01) , 1(N28)
4.B. 1(N42A) 1(N25) , 5.A. 2(N14) , GAR
5.B. 3(N42A) 1(N25) ,
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UNESCO
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
We may expect in the near future to encounter
recently excavated artifacts moving through the
antiquities markets. It will be important to be
able to identify both those pieces that are
legitimate objects of sale, and those that must
be confiscated by law enforcement and returned to
their country of origin according to UNESCO's
Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and
Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and
Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property
ratified in 1972 and accepted by the United
States in 1983. An example of what this trade
looks like follows in the next slide.
ltSlide 17 of 20gt
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Texts currently offered
Three proto-cuneiform texts were auctioned by
Bonhams London one month ago that CDLI files
recorded as having been offered through Amman,
Jordan, in September of 2000.
The following six lots (232-237) are from a
private collection formed in the Middle East in
the 1960s and taken to Canada when the owners
emigrated there in 1970, then imported into this
Country in 1990.
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State of texts in IM
The identification of illegally traded
antiquities is made very difficult when these
have not been documented in their museums of
origin. CDLI proposes the digital capture of all
cuneiform collections.
Many of the cuneiform texts in the Iraq Muse-um
are fragmentary, unpublished, and un-catalogued
(examples two shoe boxes of neo-Babylonian
administra-tive texts, ca. 550 B.C.)
ca. 200 fragments
ca. 60 fragments
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CDLI
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative Los
Angeles/Berlin
1) Need for a concerted effort to digitally
capture and preserve for future generations the
world cultural heritage that defines our place in
history. 2) International research projects (for
instance, the EU-funded European Cultural
Heritage Online directed by the Max Planck
Society), and efforts funded by DLI 1 and 2, and
currently ITR, have developed applications that
make the general capture of cultural heritage a
realistic goal. 3) NSF commits to this cultural
heritage imperative in a ten-year initiative that
proposes to combine the assets of IT with those
of a community of humanists to place in the
public domain a permanent repository of the
history of man.