ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Encoding Equivalence: The CUNEI Form Project and Ancient Bilingual Lexica

• In Event: Global Knowledge(s): From Mono- to Plurilingual Research at the Intersection of Digital Humanities/AI, Language Corpora, and the Making of Scientific Knowledge

English Abstract

This paper examines how the CUNEI Form initiative digitally reconstructs cuneiform tablets and lexical lists, reviving the bilingual (Sumerian–Akkadian) scholarship of ancient Mesopotamia. It explores how database design—linking transliteration, translation, and metadata—mirrors ancient practices of linguistic comparison and raises methodological questions about representing equivalence across scripts and epochs.

Author

• Klaus Wagensonner