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After 90 years, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is finally complete with the publication of Volume 20 U/W. All of the volumes are available for purchase or as free searchable PDFs.

See the following related news items:

–Martha Roth discussing “The Final Chapter” (video) and How we wrote the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (JNES article via JSTOR)

–Anna Steinhelper provides an apt portrayal of the feat in the most recent OI News & Notes (Winter 2011).

The press on the OI exhibit continues:

Seeing examples of early writing from these four areas together in one place, you can’t fail to be impressed by the wonder of human creativity in these independent inventions that fundamentally transformed the very nature of civilization

With more videos:

The ASOR blog has reported the news that after a brief illness Professor Rainey passed away today, February 19, 2011, at the age of 81.

ז״ל May his memory be for a blessing.

If you live in the Chicago area, there is a free public lecture tonight by Chris Woods at 7pm in Breasted Hall related to the new, excellent Oriental Institute exhibit of the same name. Even if you cannot make the lecture, the exhibit is well worth the time–and you could download for free the official publication to whet your appetite.

The ability to represent language graphically, to make language visible, stands as one of humanity’s greatest intellectual and cultural achievements. Given in conjunction with the special exhibit, Visible Language, this lecture explores how and why humans first invented writing by comparing the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Mesoamerican inventions–the four instances in history when writing was invented–out of nothing. In this lecture, Christopher Woods discusses cultural contexts and structural features of each of these systems, focusing on important similarities and differences between them.

UPDATE: A recent article discusses the positives and some negatives of the new exhibit.

The Miqra’ Group has a two-year plan for reading the entire Hebrew Bible. (HT: Charles)

LiveScience posted a short Q&A with Gonzalo Rubio about working in dead languages. In response to a question about what it is like to study a dead langauge, Rubio said, “In many regards, we are resuscitating a dead civilization through the understanding of its dead languages.” He continued:

When one studies an economic document from ancient Mesopotamia, there are names of individuals entering a contract or making a purchase, normally in front of a number of named witnesses: These are all people who lived three or four thousand years ago, people whose names were forgotten and buried in the sand until modern scholars brought them back to a modicum of life in their articles and books. When an assyriologist holds a tablet inscribed with cuneiform characters, be it in Sumerian or in Akkadian, there is a chance that she or he may be the first person to read that text again after millennia of oblivion. Even if one is not the epigrapher who first looks at the tablets found at an archaeological site, even as a scholar reading texts at a museum, there is an overwhelming feeling of discovery and recovery, the excitement of bringing a civilization back to life by understanding it, text by text, tablet by tablet.

Finally, Pete Bekins has continued his helpful series of article/book summaries with a brief discussion of Blau’s Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew. Pete’s assessment of the book is spot on. I agree that it is good to have this title finally published in English, but it exposes the unfortunate state of affairs in the study of Biblical Hebrew phonology and morphology.