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DIGITAL HAMMURABI
ha - am - mu - ra - bi*

Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding (ICE)



In the Fall of 1999 Dean Snyder, a Senior Information Technology Specialist at Johns Hopkins University, proposed two projects to colleagues at Hopkins:  the computer encoding of cuneiform script and the 3D scanning of cuneiform tablets, the world's oldest written documents. They responded with enthusiasm and thus were born both the Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding (ICE) and the Digital Hammurabi Project at Johns Hopkins University.

On November 2 & 3, 2000 Hopkins hosted the first international Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding conference (ICE 1), where leading cuneiformists, Unicode experts, software engineers, linguists, and font architects, gathered to begin development of an international standard computer encoding for Sumero/Akkadian cuneiform, the world’s oldest attested writing system.

Participants discussed the theoretical and practical issues surrounding the encoding and issued a unanimous statement of agreement on methodologies. A working group was established to develop the formal encoding proposal for the Unicode Consortium.


Top row:
Dr. Simo Parpola, Helsinki
Dr. Steve Tinney, Philadelphia
Dean Snyder, Shrewsbury, PA
John Jenkins, Salt Lake City
Tom R. Davis, Birmingham, UK
Karljuergen Feuerherm, Toronto

Bottom row:
Dr. Alasdair Livingstone, Birmingham, UK
Dr. Kenneth Whistler, San Francisco
Rick McGowan, San Jose
Dr. Jerrold S. Cooper, Baltimore
Dr. Lloyd B. Anderson, Washington D.C.
1st International ICE Conference
November 2-3, 2000
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD, USA

The second international Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding conference (ICE 2) was again hosted by Johns Hopkins, June 5-6, 2003. Plans were finalized for the formal proposal to Unicode. Dr. Steve Tinney, Dr. Madeleine Fitzgerald, and Cale Johnson would do most of the editing of the sign repertoire; Tinney, with technical help from Michael Everson, would create the cuneiform font for the proposal.


Top row:
Cale Johnson, Los Angeles)
Dr. Karljuergen Feuerherm, Toronto)
Phil Blair

Middle row:
Dr. Steve Tinney, Philadelphia
Dr. Madeleine Fitzgerald, Los Angeles
Dr. Lloyd B. Anderson, Washington D.C.
Lee Watkins, Jr., Annapolis

Bottom row:
Michael Everson, Westport, Ireland
Rick McGowan, San Jose
Dr. Kenneth Whistler, San Francisco
Dr. Jerrold S. Cooper, Baltimore
Dean Snyder, Shrewsbury, PA
2nd International ICE Conference
June 5-6, 2003
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD, USA

After seven years effort, the Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding proposal was unanimously accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee and the ISO 10646 Committee Working Group 2 in 2006. Cuneiform is now officially in Unicode 5.0 and will soon be available on the major computer operating systems for use by cuneiformists worldwide.

Milestones along the way have included:

1st International ICE Conference

The first international ICE conference was hosted by Johns Hopkins University, November 2-3, 2000. Participants discussed the theoretical and practical issues surrounding the encoding and issued a unanimous statement of agreement on methodologies. A working group was established to develop the formal encoding proposal for the Unicode Consortium.

$1.63 Million National Science Foundation Grant

The NSF awarded Digital Hammurabi and ICE a 3-year, $1.63 million grant in April 19, 2002 to build a 3D scanner for cuneiform tablets and encode the cuneiform script. One of the reviewers of the proposal said that it was

"head-and-shoulders above the others we reviewed, and among the best of it's kind we've seen in years."

USA Today Newspaper

USA Today newspaper wrote about Digital Hammurabi on May 21, 2002:

"The most ambitious project is Digital Hammurabi, which this month received a grant from the National Science Foundation, a big supporter of putting science resources online. A normal computer scanner can make a digital photo of most early tablets. Later ones require the 3-D view because scribes of the time wrote on every side of a tablet. 'A photo doesn't really capture it,' says Johns Hopkins Assyriologist Jerrold Cooper. 'The beauty of this is that with fast and cheap 3-D scanning, we can practically put the tablet in your hands on your desktop,' he adds."

Leiden, Netherlands Presentation at RAI

Snyder presented a progress report on Digital Hammurabi and ICE at the 48th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Leiden, Netherlands, July 2-4, 2002. He also met in London, at the British Museum, with Christopher Walker, keeper of cuneiform tablets, and discussed the possibility of scanning their tablet collections.

Baltimore Sun Newspaper

The Baltimore Sun newspaper ran a feature article on Digital Hammurabi in its February 16, 2003, Sunday edition.

"Once you've learned to decipher cuneiform, which takes at least three or four years, tracking down reading material can be just as hard. The clay tablets are often discovered in pieces. 'One fragment could go to a museum in Britain, the other could be in Philadelphia and maybe the third is in Britain. You can spend a third of your time just doing footwork to try and track everything down,' said Piotr Michalowski, a professor of ancient Near Eastern languages at the University of Michigan.

But a team of professors and scientists is working at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Howard County and on the Homewood campus in Baltimore to change that by creating an Internet library of scanned cuneiform tablets."

American Oriental Society Luncheon

At the April 5, 2003 American Oriental Society in Nashville Snyder convened a 2 hour luncheon meeting with ten of the leading cuneiformists in the US to discuss methodological issues related to encoding cuneiform. Attendees include:

Richard Averbeck, Giorgio Buccellati, Jerrold Cooper, Madeleine Fitzgerald, William Hallo, Cale Johnson, Piotr Michalowski, David Owen, Matthew Stolper, and Niek Veldhuis.

Access To World's Best Cuneiform Sign Lists

Dr. Miguel Civil, Dr. Rykle Borger, and Dr. Robert England, authors of the three most important cuneiform sign lists in the world, all of them previously unpublished, and some in development for more than 40 years, each gave ICE permission to use their unpublished materials in generating its encoding. The cuneiform sign repertoire embodied in the ICE proposal is truly an historic milestone in cuneiform studies, representing, as it does, the merger of these three lists.

2nd International ICE Conference

The second international ICE conference was hosted again at Johns Hopkins, on June 5-6, 2003. Plans were finalized for the formal proposal to Unicode. Dr. Steve Tinney, Dr. Madeleine Fitzgerald, and Cale Johnson would do most of the editing of the sign repertoire; Tinney, with technical help from Michael Everson, would create the cuneiform font for the proposal.

Hopkins Magazine Cover Page & Lead Article

Digital Hammurabi and ICE were featured on the front cover and as the lead article of the September 2003 Hopkins Magazine.

"Funded by $1.65 million from the National Science Foundation, Digital Hammurabi aims to create electronic archives of detailed, three-dimensional images of cuneiform tablets. Secondarily, work supported by the grant may eventually enable scholars to write cuneiform on a computer, something currently problematic because there is no standard computer encoding of cuneiform signs."

Preliminary Proposal

The first formal proposal for encoding Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform was presented to the Unicode Technical Committee at their meeting hosted by ICE at Johns Hopkins in November 3-7, 2003.

National Geographic Magazine

National Geographic magazine wrote about Digital Hammurabi in their March 2004 issue:

"Scholars mourned when archaeological artifacts in Iraq were looted or destroyed in the aftermath of the recent war. But in the future there may be a way to create a lasting record of irreplaceable artifacts. The Digital Hammurabi Project, begun at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is working with companies like Arius 3D in Toronto to develop high-resolution scanners that create detailed images such as this one of a seventh-century B.C. cuneiform tablet found in Mesopotamia. Some 300,000 tablets eventually could be scanned and their images made available through the Internet."

Unanimously Approved

The ICE cuneiform final encoding proposal was unanimously approved by both the Unicode Technical Committee and the ISO 10646 Committee Working Group 2 at their June 15-25, 2004 meeting in Toronto.

Cuneiform Text Input Method

Digital Hammurabi team member Dean Snyder created the world's first cuneiform text input method, enabling easy and intuitive text entry of the approximately 1,000 cuneiform signs using a standard computer keyboard.

Officially in Unicode

Cuneiform was officially accepted into Unicode 5.0 in 2006, seven years after ICE started the process. From the Unicode 5.0 acknowledgements section:

"For Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform: Michael Everson, Karljürgen Feuerherm, Steve Tinney, Madeleine Fitzgerald, and Cale Johnson. This script addition was aided in part by funds made available to participants by Johns Hopkins University through the Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding, by the National Science Foundation through the Digital Hammurabi Project, by the Society of Biblical Literature, and by the Script Encoding Initiative, University of California Berkeley. Special thanks are due to Dean Snyder and Jerrold S. Cooper of Johns Hopkins University for their leading roles in organizing and hosting two ICE conferences that were crucial to progress on the encoding."

The code point charts are divided between the core signs cuneiform signs and those covering the numbers and punctuation.

Software Development Times Newspaper

Software Development Times notes the acceptance of cuneiform in Unicode 5.0 in its October 15, 2006 issue:

"Sumero-Akkadian Recognized Here - Unicode 5.0 adds scripts from ancient languages

The cuneiform characters represent the effort of a multidisciplinary team based out of Johns Hopkins University, known as the Digital Hammurabi project."

Big History Recognition

Cynthia Stokes Brown writes in her 2007 American Book Award book, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present:

"About 300 people today read cuneiform. Johns Hopkins University has established a project, called Digital Hammurabi, whose goal is creating an electronic archive of all known tablets in 3-D images so that scholars around the world can work on translating them."

 
 
 
 
ICE 1 was made possible by the support of the following Johns Hopkins University people and institutions:

Sayeed Choudhury (Digital Knowledge Center, MSE Library), James Neal (Director, MSE Library), Gary Ostrander (Associate Dean of Research, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences), Stephanie Reel (CIO and Vice-Provost of IT), Lee Watkins, Jr. (Director, Research & Instructional Technologies), Johanna Zacharias (Director of Communications, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences)


ICE 2 was made possible by the support of the National Science Foundation, Johns Hopkins University, and the Society of Biblical Literature.