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provides English translations; and (4) it is the “only corpus of any Ancient Middle Eastern language
that has been tagged and lemmatized” (Ebel<strong>in</strong>g 2007). These literary texts also differ from
adm<strong>in</strong>istrative texts <strong>in</strong> that they spell out the morphology <strong>in</strong> detail and provide a source for cultural and
religious vocabulary.
The ETSCL, like the CDLI and the BDNTS, conta<strong>in</strong>s transliterations of Sumerian, where the orig<strong>in</strong>al
cuneiform has been converted <strong>in</strong>to and is represented by a sequence of Roman characters. As noted
above, it also conta<strong>in</strong>s English translations, and transliterations and translations are l<strong>in</strong>ked at the
paragraph level. This supports a parallel read<strong>in</strong>g of the orig<strong>in</strong>al text and translation. In addition, the
entire corpus is marked up <strong>in</strong> TEI (P4) with some extensions <strong>in</strong> order to accommodate textual variants
and l<strong>in</strong>guistic annotations, which, Ebel<strong>in</strong>g admitted, had “sometimes stretched the descriptive
apparatus to the limit.” One challenge of present<strong>in</strong>g the text and transliteration side-by-side <strong>in</strong> the
ETSCL was that the transliteration was often put together from several fragmentary sources. This was
solved by us<strong>in</strong>g the tagpair and from the TEI. The “type” attribute is used to
<strong>in</strong>dicate whether it is a primary or secondary variant. A special format was also developed for
encod<strong>in</strong>g broken and damaged texts.
One major advance of the ETSCL for corpus studies is that the transliterations were lemmatized with
an automatic morphological parser (developed by the PSD Project) and the output was then proofread.
While this process took a year, it also supports lemmatized search<strong>in</strong>g of the ETSCL, and when a user
clicks on an <strong>in</strong>dividual lemma <strong>in</strong> the ETSCL it can launch a search <strong>in</strong> the PSD and vice versa. In sum,
the ETSCL serves as a “diachronic, annotated, transliterated, bil<strong>in</strong>gual, parallel corpus of literature or
as an all-<strong>in</strong>-one corpus” (Ebel<strong>in</strong>g 2007). The further development of l<strong>in</strong>guistic analysis and corpus
search tools for the ETSCL has also been detailed by Tablan et al. (2006):
The ma<strong>in</strong> aim of our work is to create a set of tools for perform<strong>in</strong>g automatic morphological
analysis of Sumerian. This essentially entails identify<strong>in</strong>g the part of speech for each word <strong>in</strong> the
corpus (technically, this only <strong>in</strong>volves nouns and verbs which are the only categories that are
<strong>in</strong>flected), separat<strong>in</strong>g the lemma part from the clitics and assign<strong>in</strong>g a morphological function to
each of the clitics (Tablan et al. 2006).
The authors used the open-source GATE (General Architecture for Text Eng<strong>in</strong>eer<strong>in</strong>g), 106 which was
developed at the University of Sheffield, and found that one of the biggest problems <strong>in</strong> evaluat<strong>in</strong>g the
success of their methods was that they lacked a morphological gold standard for Sumerian aga<strong>in</strong>st
which to evaluate their data. Many of the challenges faced by the ETSCL thus illustrate some of the
common issues faced when creat<strong>in</strong>g corpora for historical languages, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g a lack of lexical
resources and gold standard tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g and evaluation data, the difficulties of automatic process<strong>in</strong>g, and
the need to represent physically fragmented sources.
A recently started literary text project is the SEAL (Sources of Early Akkadian Literature) 107 corpus,
which is composed of Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian) literary texts from the third and second
centuries BC that were documented on cuneiform tablets. The goal of this project, which is funded by
the German Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF), is to “compile a
complete and <strong>in</strong>dexed corpus of Akkadian literary texts from the 3rd and 2nd Millennia BCE.” They
hope that this corpus will form the basis for both a history and a glossary of early Akkadian literature.
Around 150 texts are available and they are organized by genre classifications (such as epics, hymns,
106 http://gate.ac.uk/
107 http://www.seal.uni-leipzig.de/