Union Académique Internationale

Project nº15, adopted in 1951 (Assyrian) & 1971 (Sumerian)

The original main project was the Chicago Assyrian Dictionnary adopted by the UAI in 1951. Three auxiliary projects were also adopted.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionnary (CAD) The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, initiated in 1921 by James Henry Breasted, is compiling a comprehensive dictionary of the various dialects of Akkadian, the earliest known Semitic language that was recorded on cuneiform texts that date from c. 2400 B.C. to A.D. 100 which were recovered from archaeological excavations of ancient Near Eastern sites. The Assyrian Dictionary is in every sense a joint undertaking of resident and non-resident scholars from around the world who have contributed their time and labor over a period of seventy years to the collection of the source materials and to the publication of the Dictionary. The dictionnary has been completed in 2010. 21 volumes has been published.

Materialien Zum Sumerischen Lexikon (MSL) A Reconstruction of Sumerian and Akkadian Lexical Texts published under the sponsorship of the Ponteficial Biblical Institute (16 volumes).

Materials for the Assyrian Dictionnary (MAD) Published by the Oritental Institute of the University of Chicago (5 volumes).

Materiali per il vocabolario neosumerico Initated by the Italian National Union of Academies in 1971 (22 volumes).

I Dizionari del Vicino Oriente Antico The project I Dizionari del Vicino Oriente Antico aims at reviving and completing the project Dizionario Sumerico and Dizionario Assiro, launched by the Unione Accademica Nazionale. The renewed arrangement of the project – started at the end of 2015 – includes the preparation of an almost complete series of dictionaries on the languages spoken and written in the Ancient Near East – namely in the Syro-Levantine, Mesopotamian, Iranic, Anatolic, and Egyptian areas – from the Bronze Age to Late Antiquity. This ambitious project is first of all devoted to providing various levels of researchers – from university students to specialists – with easily accessible, concise, and at the same time highly reliable instruments for the study of the ancient texts. It is the scientific committee’s opinion that the knowledge of ancient Near Eastern languages is instrumental to the understanding of the cultural richness of the region and of its profound relations with European culture and, therefore, the whole series of the dictionaries is useful for researchers interested in various disciplines, philological, historical and archaeological. It is also stressed that, if the choice of Italian as language of translation corresponds to the primarily didactic function of the dictionaries, it is also motivated by the intention of promoting a new and thorough lexicographical study, based on linguistic and philological up-to-date researches, and which resorts to the existing dictionaries in English and German, but proposes a radical re-thinking of the lexical materials. In the last two years the work has been concentrated on two dictionaries: the Sumerian and the Neo-Assyrian ones. In the first case, the lemmata belong to a specific sector of the documentation, which appears central in the didactic practice of the university courses, i.e. royal inscriptions, and is particularly interesting even for the non-specialists. Compared with the existing repertoires, the dictionary aims at being easily consultable, concise, and characterized by a historical perspective concerning each lemma. The research and drafting work has been entrusted to Dr. Massimo Maiocchi under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Gebhard Selz. The publication of the volume is foreseen before the end of 2019. The Neo-Assyrian dictionary is conceived as an important complement to the existing dictionaries, insofar as it considers a specific sector of the Akkadian language, i.e. the variety used in Assyria in the X-VII centuries BC and especially in the documents stemming from the offices of imperial administration. The dictionary specifically devoted to these texts is thought of as an important and innovative tool for the comprehension of this level of the language and, at the same time, a concise and easily usable tool for the study of the documentation. The preparation of the volume has been entrusted to Dr. Silvia Salin, with the collaboration and supervision of Prof. F.M. Fales and S. Ponchia. The publication is foreseen in about two years. The work on the two dictionaries is made possible thanks to the cooperation with departments of the Universities of Verona and Venice – Ca’ Foscari and, mostly, of the ISMEO and a project there directed by Prof. Adriano Rossi and financed by the Italian Ministry of the University (MIUR). These institutions are funding the work of the researchers with annual grants. In the meanwhile the beginning of the work on other dictionaries (namely: Standard Babylonian, Elamite, Hittite, Ugaritic, Egyptian, Phenician and Punic, Aramaic, and furthermore Syriac and Coptic) is planned according to a schedule that will be progressively defined also depending on the availability of resources.