Field of Focus III – Digital Humanities Database for the personal names of the Middle Assyrian texts

Project management: Prof. Dr. Ariel M. Bagg

The aim of the project “Database for the personal names of the Middle Assyrian texts” is to create a functional web-based database that meets the requirements of a project in the field of the onomastics and of the international standards for similar projects. It is a database for the DFG-funded project “The Prosopography of the Middle Assyrian Texts (PMA),” directed by Prof. Dr. Ariel M. Bagg (Seminar for Languages and Cultures of the Near East/Assyriology) since September 2019, whose aim is to write a “bibliographic” lexicon of the approximately 5,000 personal names (approximately 12,500 individuals) attested in the Middle Assyrian corpus. The corpus consists of about 3,000 cuneiform texts from the second half of the second millennium BCE, written in the Middle Assyrian dialect of Akkadian. According to the data management concept presented to the DFG, a user-friendly database should be developed, fed with data by the applicant during the project and converted into a web-based database after the finalisation of the project (August 2025). The database not only plays an important role during the project, but it will also enable future updates and further studies after the conclusion of the project. In order to achieve a sustainable and public accessibility of the project results, the web-based software easydb will be used for the implementation of the database according to an agreement with the UB Heidelberg.