Middle Eastern and North African Studies
Resources relevant for the study of the Middle East (Southwest Asia) and North Africa from the ancient to the modern period
Inventory of the Near East Seminar Collection
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NEResourceCollectionInventory2014.xlsxBooks, monograph series, monographs, serials in Near Eastern Studies currently shelved in room 3020 Thayer Bldg.
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Near East Seminar CollectionA browsable listing of the materials currently shelved under Near East Seminar in room 3020 Thayer
Literature databases, Bibliographies / guides & Reference works
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JSTOR (licensed access for U-M affiliates)Provides full-text access to the archives of core scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. For the Ancient Near East it includes The Journal of Cuneiform Studies, The Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Near Eastern Archaeology, Anatolian Studies, and The Journal of the American Oriental Society, among others.
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The Ancient World in JSTOR (AWOL)Full list of journals in JSTOR with substantial focus on the Ancient World.
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L'Année Philologique: Bibliography of the Classical WorldSpecialized bibliographic database of scholarly works relating to all aspects of Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, including: Greek and Latin literature and linguistics, Greek and Roman history, art, archaeology, philosophy, religion, mythology, music, science, and scholarly sub-specialties such as numismatics, papyrology, and epigraphy
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ABZU (Charles E. Jones)"Abzu is a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world."
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AWOL - The Ancient World Online (Charles Ellwood Jones)Project focused on notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, successor to Abzu.
One of suite of online resources initiated by and with the continuing support of The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. -
Propylaeum | Specialized information service for ClassicsCovers Egyptology, Ancient Near East, etc
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KeiBi Online (Keilschriftbibliographie - Cuneiform Bibliography)Electronic edition of the Keilschriftbibliographie (Cuneiform Bibliography), an indispensable tool for research, teaching and study that has been published since 1940 in the journal Orientalia by the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome.
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CDLI:wiki A Library of Knowledge of the Cuneiform Digital Library InitiativeTools and main encyclopedic articles can be accessed through the menu on the left. Important tools such as lists of year names and eponyms are found under the section “Tools”, sub-section “Chronology & Dates”. Bibliographical resources, such as Abbreviations for Assyriology, are found under “Bibliographical Tools”.
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CDLI Related Projects and Online ResourcesFrom the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
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Melammu Project: The Heritage of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near EastIncludes bibliography, database of documented links between the civilizations of Ancient Mesopotamia (Assyria, Babylonia and Sumer) and contemporary and later civilizations, lists of links, and project / symopsia / workshop notices.
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Digital Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Statues, Reliefs and Paintings (Porter & Moss)Digital version of this essential and comprehensive reference resource (Topical Bibliography = Porter & Moss) for Egyptologists, presenting and analyzing both published and unpublished information about ancient Egyptian monuments.
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Online Egyptological Bibliography (OEB)OEB includes the volumes of the previous Annual Egyptological Bibliography (AEB) combined with the Bibliographie Altägypten (BA), providing coverage of Egyptological literature from 1822 to 2002 (roughly 70,000 items).
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A Bibliography of Semitic Linguistics (1940-2012) (Gregorio del Olmo Lete)"The aim of the bibliography is to collect and arrange systematically only those studies directly or mainly related to subjects of Semitic linguistics, namely, those centered on the study of languages and their phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic constituents, from both the comparative perspective(close and distant relationship) and the immanent perspective (grammar and lexicon)."
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Selected Bibliography of Recent Scholarship in Ugaritic Studies (Gregorio del Olmo Lete)Brief bibliography following the author's overview of the current state of the field for Ugaritic studies, 2014
Corpora / Text / Image Collections
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ACHEMENETOriginally designed by Pierre Briant with the support of the Collège de France and now hosted and developed within the Department of Oriental Antiquities of the Louvre Museum, this platform supports Achemenid Studies and research through databases of texts, inscriptions, iconography, archaeological sites, object images, and publications (including ARTA = Achaemenid Research on Texts and Archaeology and scholarly notices originally appearing in NABU = Nouvelles assyriologiques brèves et utilitaires.
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Annotated Corpus of Luwian Texts"This is a pilot version of the Annotated Corpus of Luwian Texts (ACLT). It comprises the analysis the Iron Age Luwian texts, most of which are included in the published volumes of the Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions (CHLI) by J. David Hawkins, as well as the cuneiform texts of the Bronze Age published in the Die keilschrift-luwischen Texte in Umschrift (StBoT 30) by Frank Starke."
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Arachne"iDAI.objects arachne (short form: Arachne) is the central object database of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne. It is administered by Reinhard Förtsch and part of the iDAI.world." A number of projects are represented, including Syrian Heritage Archive Project, The Archive of Friedrich W. Hinkel, Bequest of Friedrich Rakob, African Archaeology Archive Cologne
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Catalog der Texte der Hethiter (CTH)Catalogue des textes hittites - Catalogue of Hittite Texts
Electronic edition of the CTH by S. Košak und G.G.W. Müller, continuing the work of Emmanuel Laroche published in 1971. -
Cuneiform Commentaries Project (Yale)"Mesopotamian commentaries represent the world’s oldest cohesive group of hermeneutic texts. Numbering nearly 900, the earliest date to the eighth century and the latest to ca. 100 BCE. The purpose of this website is to make the corpus available both to the scholarly community and a more general audience by providing background information on the genre, a searchable catalog, as well as photos, drawings, annotated editions, and translations of individual commentary tablets. For the first time the cuneiform commentaries, currently scattered over 21 museums around the globe, will be accessible on one platform."
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Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI)A joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Oxford, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin incorporating material from a vast number of collections. The project aims at making available online the image and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. Also hosts several publications (Cuneiform Digital Library Journal, Bulletin, Notes, and Preprints).
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CMAwRo : Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft RitualsOne of many projects hosted by The Oracc (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus)
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Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI)"DASI seeks to gather all known pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphic material into a comprehensive online database, with the aim to make available to specialists and to the broader public a wide array of documents often underestimated because of their difficulty of access." Current projects include Corpus of South Arabian Inscriptions, Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA), Corpus of Aramaic Inscriptions, and Corpus of Nabataean Inscriptions.
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The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL)"The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a project of the University of Oxford, comprises a selection of nearly 400 literary compositions recorded on sources which come from ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and date to the late third and early second millennia BCE.
The corpus contains Sumerian texts in transliteration, English prose translations and bibliographical information for each composition. The transliterations and the translations can be searched, browsed and read online using the tools of the website." -
ETANA (Electronic Tools and Ancient Near East Archives)ABZU, Core Texts, eTACT
"ETANA is a multi-institutional collaborative project initiated in August 2000, as an electronic publishing project designed to enhance the study of the history and culture of the ancient Near East." Included are ABZU (a bibliographic guide to online open access data relevant to the study of the Ancient Near East), Core Texts (electronic editions of classic texts for teaching and research), and eTACT (electronic translations of Akkadian Cuneiform texts) -
Late Old Babylonian Personal Names Index (LOB-PNI) (Seth Richardson)"This searchable file of personal names derives from cuneiform texts chiefly dating to the reigns of the last three kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon, 1683-1595 B.C. Version 3 indexes 14,315 unique attestations of personal names from almost 3,000 texts, including 4,678 entries from around 700 unpublished texts."
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MUDIRA - Munich Digital Research ArchivesA joint project of the Institute of Egyptology of the University of Munich and the State Museum of Egyptian Art Munich which makes available digitally the extensive image collections of these two institutions.
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MĪS PÎ (Revised and corrected texts of Walker and Dick's Induction of the Cult Image in Mesopotamia, 2001)Michael B. Dick's updated critical edition of MĪS PÎ in electronic format cf. C. Walker and M. Dick, The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mis Pî Ritual, vol. 1: State Archives of Assyria Literary Texts, Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001 (BL 1620 .I53 2001)
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Old Assyrian Text ProjectPortal of the Old Assyrian Text Project, a collaborative project designed to produce new editions of Old Assyrian archives and specialized studies of the Old Assyrian period.
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Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA)"The Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia [OCIANA] aims to transform our knowledge of the history, languages and cultures of ancient Arabia. It is doing this by creating a digital corpus of all known pre-Islamic inscriptions in North and Central Arabia. It provides a reading of each text both in roman transliteration and in fonts reproducing the ancient letters, together with a translation in English, references to earlier readings, commentary where necessary, bibliography, and all known information about the inscription (provenance, carving technique, relationship to other texts or to rock drawings, structures, etc.). Photographs (when available) and facsimiles of each text will also be shown on each record and will eventually be downloadable free at publishable resolutions. The Corpus will be easily updatable as new discoveries are made and will be fully searchable for names, words, grammatical features and subjects."
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Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc)"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." Browse the "Projects" listing for an overview of work currently hosted on the platform.
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Oracc Project ListRich listing of projects hosted on the Oracc platform (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus)
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State Archives of Assyria Online (SAAo)"State Archives of Assyria Online (SAAo) is an open-access web resource that aims to make the rich Neo-Assyrian materials found in the royal archives of Nineveh, and elsewhere, more widely accessible. Headed by Karen Radner, the creation of SAAo has been made possible through the generous support of colleagues based at Cambridge, London, Munich, Philadelphia and Vienna as part of research conducted with Austrian, German and UK funding.
Based on an existing ASCII text database created by Simo Parpola and his team at the University of Helsinki, the online transliterations and translations are those of the standard editions in the series State Archives of Assyria. All of the published volumes are accessible online, in addition to volume 2 of the companion series State Archives of Assyria Studies, the edition of the Eponym Lists and Chronicles. The web presentation and linguistic annotation are carried out using tools and standards developed by Steve Tinney (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia)." -
Syrian Digital Library of Cuneiform (SDLC)"The Syrian Digital Library of Cuneiform (SDLC) project represents the collaborative efforts of a Syrian and international team of researchers to prepare an interactive Arabic / English / French presentation of a rich and indigenous cuneiform tradition dating back five millennia. The cuneiform tablets collections, kept mainly in the museums of Damascus, Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa, and Idlib, originate from close to 40 different archaeological sites. Based on an integrated catalogue, those texts which have already been published will be the subject of an electronic edition, consisting of digital images and transliterations, presented via the web-pages of the SDLC. This presentation will be directly linked to the international project CDLI, making the texts part of an ever growing corpus of cuneiform texts freely available online, and benefitting from the powerful search tools of that project."
Online Dictionaries and Grammars
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The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD)Volumes of The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD) available for free PDF download.
Initiated in 1921 by James Henry Breasted and continued to completion in 2011 by scholars around the world, The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD), compiles a comprehensive dictionary of the various dialects of Akkadian, dating from c. 2400 B.C. to A.D. 100 (held at PJ 3525 .C53, Hatcher & Near East Seminar) -
Akkadian Dictionary (Association Assyrophile de France)Online dictionary of Akkadian with translations in French and English.
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Comprehensive Aramaic LexiconWork-in-progress text base of the Aramaic texts in all dialects from the earliest (9th century BCE) through the 13th century CE, currently with a database of approximately 3 million lexically parsed words, and an associated set of electronic tools for analyzing and manipulating the data, whose ultimate goal is the creation of a complete lexicon of the language.
The database also includes browsable texts and concordance tables. -
The Electronic Chicago Hittite Dictionary (eCHD)Electronic tool for disseminating the published contents of The Chicago Hittite Dictionary. Requires installation (follow the link to "launch the eCHD"). (published print volumes L-S at P 945 .Z8 U55 1980, Hatcher & Near East Seminar)
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Cuneiform Luvian Lexicon (H. Craig Melchert)Unrevised PDF version of the author's 1993 edition which he has made available online, giving consent for it to be printed and further reproduced without charge. The work remains under copyright and should be cited as such.
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The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (PSD) ProjectIncluding the Electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (ePSD) an online version of the project begin in 1974 by Åke Sjöberg and Erle Leichty. The ePSD allows one to search the dictionary, the Index to Sumerian Secondary Literature and the Sign list. Carried out in the Babylonian Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Every entry includes: cuneiform logograms used for that word, a translation, historical period, translation in Akkadian, additional forms attested and references used.
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Sumerian Lexicon (John A. Halloran)Online Version 3.0 of the Sumerian lexicon: a dictionary guide to the ancient Sumerian language / edited, compiled, and arranged by John Alan Halloran (Hatcher Graduate PJ 4037 .H35 2006). Also available for PDF download.
Print Dictionaries, Grammars, and Sign Lists
Dictionaries, Grammars, Sign Lists
Dictionaries
Akkadisches Handwörterbuch : unter Benutzung des lexikalischen Nachlasses von Bruno Meissner (1868-1947) / bearbeitet von Wolfram von Soden..
Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz, 1985.
Hatcher Graduate - Near East Seminar - Rm. 3020 Thayer Academic Bldg (Dept of Near Eastern Studies) | PJ 3540 .S68 1985
Hatcher Graduate - Near East Reference - Rm. 110 N | PJ3540 .S68
Grammars
AKKADIAN
A Grammar of Akkadian (1997) and "Key to a Grammar of Akkadian" (1997), by J. Huehnergard.
Hatcher Graduate: PJ 3251 .H841 1997 Hatcher Graduate: PJ 3251 .H851 1997
Akkadian grammar / by Arthur Ungnad ; revised by Lubor Matous ; translated by Harry A. Hoffner, Jr. Atlanta, Ga. : Scholars Press, c1992.
Hatcher Graduate: PJ 3251 .U57 1992
Introduction to Akkadian, by R. Caplice (1988).
Hatcher Graduate Library: PJ 3251 .C32 1988
Grundriss der akkadischen Grammatik / Wolfram von Soden. Roma : Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1995.
Hatcher Graduate - Near East Reference - Rm. 110 N | DS 42 .A53 v.33 1995
Hatcher Graduate - Near East Seminar - Rm. 3020 Thayer Academic Bldg (Dept of Near Eastern Studies) | DS 42 .A53 v.33 1995
Sign Lists
LABAT: Manuel d'épigraphie akkadienne (Presents a list of cuneiform signs that shows their evolution, phonetic values, date and ideographic values)
Near East Seminar - Rm. 3020 Thayer Academic Bldg (Dept of Near Eastern Studies): PJ 3193 .L12 1995 or Hatcher Graduate: PJ 3193 .L12 1988
Soden, Wolfram von, 1908- Das akkadische Syllabar / Wolfram von Soden, Wolfgang Röllig. Roma : Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1976.
Buhr Shelving Facility - Ask at any library | DS 42 .A53 v.42 1976
Guide to Serials and Abbreviations (Catherine Mardikes)
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Serial Guide: Classics, Ancient Near East, Medieval Latin & Byzantine StudiesGuide to serials from Catherine Mardikes at The University of Chicago Library.
Learned Societies & Directories
AGADE Listserv
"Jack M. Sasson, the Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Judaic and Biblical Studies at Vanderbilt University, has been collecting and distributing the Agade Mailing List for almost two decades, dating back to his position at The University of North Carolina, which still hosts the email distribution list. The Agade list forwards news and information of interest to scholars in biblical studies, Near Eastern studies, Late Antiquity, Judaica, Classics, archaeology, and even broad intellectual history [including many new and forthcoming publications]. It is a valuable source of announcements, and these many guilds are in debt to Professor Sasson."
To subscribe to Agade by email please send a blank email to listserv [at] unc.edu, and include (as subject and in first line): subscribe agade
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Agade List ArchiveHosted by the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL)
Last Updated: Nov 22, 2025 1:52 AM
Subjects: International Studies