Talk:Codex Hammurabi/Archive

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This article is a stub for the Code of Hammurabi, in Akkadian transliteration.

Currently, this is just a hand-typed copy of the transliteration column from Hammurabi's Gesetz -- (von J. Kohler, Professor an der Universität Berlin, und A. Ungnad, Professor an der Universität Jena; Band II: Syllabische und zusammenhangende Umschrift nebst vollständigem Glossar; Bearbeitet von Arthur Ungnad. Leipzig 1909). This book should be old enough to qualify for public domain.

After the Hammurabi's Gesetz text is typed in, we should be able to correct the transliteration with more recent versions.

Issues

The language of the source document is Akkadian (Old Babylonian dialect). Plenty of translations of the Code of Hammurabi exist online in English and German -- this is not one of them, and it probably shouldn't be annotated in another language.

Why use the Latin title, rather than an Akkadian title? The Latin title is recognizable to most speakers other languages who are likely to gain use from an Akkadian text.

Why isn't the Codex in cuneiform? Aside from issues dealing with Unicode and such, cuneiform isn't that useful for modern readers. The transliteration allows the text to be converted to cuneiform mechanically.

Why isn't the Codex in transcription? Readings of some of the signs may have changed with more recent scholarship.

What's up with the capitals and dollar signs? Akkadian tranliteration ordinarily represents the phoneme shin as š and emphatic s,t,k as ṣ,ḍ,q(or ḳ). These can be represented by HTML escape sequences or special characters, but to avoid deciding and speed up copying the text, I'm using $, S,T, and q. Since ḫ does not contrast with any other character, I'm using the otherwise unused h to represent it. Converting these into the standard format should be mechanical.

What's up with the numbers? Cuneiform often represents the same syllable with more than one cuneiform sign. Cuneiformists represent the particular sign represented by a transcribed syllable by its number (derived by its frequency of that sign's occurrence representing that syllable in Neo-Assyrian copies of Standard Babylonian literary texts). Numbers one, two, and three are represented by an accent mark, while higher numbers have their number subscripted. The most common sign used to represent the sound /lu/ is "lu", the secondmost is "lú", the thirdmost is "lù", the fourthmost is "lu₄", and the fifthmost "lu₅". I've chosen to abandon the accents and subscript markup in favor of plaintext "lu", "lu2", "lu3", "lu4", and "lu5". Converting these signs into the standard format should be mechanical.

This may be completely wrongheaded -- please let me know. Benwbrum 05:27, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

English translation

There is an English translation from Leonard William King (1869-1919). It should be in the public domain. http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/hammurabi.htm or http://www.piney.com/BabHamCode.html Perhaps you could add the translation to the text as it is done at Dante - Goettliche Komoedie:Hoelle 1.Gesang (First the original, then the translation). Then this page would be an English page and an Akkadian page. 80.133.94.203 09:15, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)(+2=MESZ)

Thanks for the suggestion! Sounds like something to explore after the original is typed up. Ben Brumfield 14:48, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Versions

The comment about King's English translation and the idea of a bilingual version has got me thinking. Conceptually speaking, there are a number of different entities under the name "Code of Hammurabi".

1. A Public Domain rendering of the original code
   1. In cuneiform autograph (of a particular version)
   2. In non-autograph cuneiform, used for instruction (e.g. Rykle Borger's Babylonisch-Assyrische Lesestücke Heft II contains both an autograph of CH and an instructional version in Neo-Assyrian characters. The latter omits column/line formatting information, and is simply laid out with a line per law.
   3. In transliteration, which may transliterate logograms such as DINGIR.ÍD as
      1. DINGIR.ÍD
      2. ^iluÍD
      3. ^dÍD
      4. ^dNâram
      5. ^iluNâram
   4. In transcription, rendering šum-ma DINGIR.ÍD as šumma Nâram
2. A public domain translation to a modern language, such as King's.
3. A public domain combination of any two of the above (usually transliteration and translation, but sometimes autograph, transliteration and translation). Kohler and Ungnad's Hammurabi's Gesetz is one of these, as it contains autographs, transliteration, transcription, and translation.

It strikes me that any of the above are good candidates for Wikisource. My personal goal is to get a transliterated version of CH in a format that could be passed through some process to render cuneiform for instructional purposes, similar to Borger's. Others may have different ideas.

Regardless, I do not believe that wikisource is a location for a bilingual text of CH. Even though such a text would merely interleave a public-domain transliteration and a public-domain translation, the resulting product would be a new creation, and would belong on the English wikibooks domain. Ben Brumfield 02:57, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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