The poets of early Akkadian — SEAL joins by grant
31 August 2026 · Nabu news
SEAL — Sources of Early Akkadian Literature (Michael P. Streck and Nathan Wasserman, Jerusalem/Leipzig) is where Assyriology keeps its poetry: the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh tablets, love lyrics, incantations, hymns and laments of the third and early second millennium BCE, each in an up-to-date scholarly transliteration with the damage honestly bracketed. It is the edition of record for this literature, and it now stands in the library — 408 compositions, 14,953 lines — under the editors’ written grant for personal research use: local only, never redistributed, every displayed line carrying the project’s credit.
The ingestion respected the edition’s variety the hard way. A first crawl parsed only the corner of the corpus the samples had shown; the full census then taught the parser four page shapes the site actually serves — tabular scores with witness sigla, labeled paragraphs, free prose — and the steady state reads every text page the archive publishes, with three broken-markup pages quarantined by name rather than served with holes.
On the dictionary side, the Coptic lexicon gained its second etymological witness: the KELLIA project’s Egyptian-etymologies table now rides beside the ORAEC crosswalk — two independent scholarly witnesses to each Coptic word’s descent through Demotic and hieroglyphic Egyptian, merged where they agree (they never disagreed: a zero-conflict census preceded the merge) and credited separately where each speaks alone.
Numbers as of 2026-08-31.