Today Mar Shiprim spotlights a one-man undertaking, a work-in-progress that is already a very useful tool for those conducting research into Akkadian prayers. We are grateful to Alan Lenzi, who has agreed to answer some questions about the two websites he has created: the “Corpus of Akkadian Shuila Prayers Online” and the “Akkadian Prayer Miscellany” website.
Enjoy the reading!
Please tell us something about yourself!
I’m Alan Lenzi. I earned my PhD in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Hebrew Bible at Brandeis University. In 2006, I began teaching at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California (USA). In addition to my other research interests in Babylonian literature, religion, and scholarship, I have been working on Akkadian prayers for about a dozen years now.
Can you describe the project “Corpus of Akkadian Shuila Prayers Online” to our readers? How did you first conceive the idea of an online corpus, and what is your main purpose?
“Corpus of Akkadian Shuila Prayers Online” (CASPo) is a digital catalog and textual repository of all cuneiform tablets and fragments bearing the text of a šuila or “hand-raising” incantation-prayer in Standard Babylonian Akkadian. (The Sumerian šuilas have been edited recently by Daisuke Shibata.) In addition to the text of the prayers, all accompanying ritual instructions are also included in the project. The opening page of the CASPo website offers more information about the prayers and contextualizes the project more broadly for the field of Assyriology and beyond.
The long-term goal of the project is to establish a textual basis for critical editions of the various Akkadian šuila-prayers and to make those texts easy to update and freely accessible to all. An intermediate goal for the project is to select several dozen of the best-attested prayers and produce a volume of translations, already under contract, for the Society of Biblical Literature’s series Writings from the Ancient World.
Although the project is very much a work in progress and still in what I would consider an early stage of development, I decided from the beginning to make it publicly available online in the hopes that it might help other researchers and perhaps encourage communication and collaboration.
I conceived the idea for the project while working on Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns: An Introduction (2011). While selecting texts for that project, I realized how many of the Akkadian šuila-prayers did not have a modern critical edition. Some of the prayers had not been edited since Ebeling’s Die akkadische Gebetsserie “Handerhebung”, published in 1953. That book was the last comprehensive treatment of the corpus. Though many of the prayers have received updated editions since Ebeling’s work, these editions did not always include the accompanying ritual instructions, and they were scattered in specialist publications, making the study of the corpus as a whole difficult for Assyriologists and inaccessible to non-specialists, who might be interested in the material for comparative purposes. So in 2012 I began compiling a catalog of texts. And shortly thereafter I started using the digital tools at The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC) to transliterate and translate each tablet. Since 2012, my university has granted me travel money on several occasions to visit the British Museum in London, the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, and the Museums of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara and photograph as many of the tablets and fragments in my catalog as possible. I use these photographs in addition to previously published transliterations, when available, to create the digital transliterations accumulating on the project web site.
The heart of the CASPo project, like other ORACC-based projects, is the textual catalog of cuneiform tablets, which uses unique identifiers (P-numbers) from the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative for each tablet. I started the CASPo catalog with a list of texts Werner Mayer labeled a šuila in his book Untersuchungen zur Formensprache der babylonischen Gebetsbeschwörungen (1976). I then added materials cataloged in Christopher Frechette’s book Mesopotamian Ritual-Prayers of “Hand-Lifting” (Akkadian Šuillas): An Investigation of Function in Light of the Idiomatic Meaning of the Rubric (2012), which incorporated many of the tablets that Mayer had identified and published in various publications since 1976. I continue to add tablets to the catalog as they come to my attention.
Presently, there are 338 tablets and fragments in the catalog. Of these, I have completed preliminary transliterations of 269. Though these are posted on the site, users should be aware that this work remains a first-pass through the material. Once I have initial transliterations for all of the tablets in the catalog, I will re-check and revise them before developing text editions of the various prayers represented among the textual witnesses.
I originally planned to keep my project on the ORACC portal. But in 2014 I decided I wanted more control over the presentation of the material and started using my own web site, which my university hosted on its servers. Using my own web site created some challenges that I still need to work out. (For example, the footnotes in the embedded text editions from ORACC do not work properly on CASPo. I have a work around, but it will be a very time consuming process to implement.) The initial web site, which was very basic, got an overhaul in 2017.
As the screen shot above shows, the new web site is rather spartan and offers only a static presentation of the material. I do all of the coding myself, and I have not made acquiring more nuanced coding skills much of a priority for this stage of the project. When my university pulled the plug on the server I was using a couple of years ago, I purchased the domain shuilas.org and moved the project to a private vendor’s server at my personal expense. At some point in the near future, I hope to get funding to work with a computer science student at University of the Pacific and create a more dynamic and user-friendly web site, which will also function better on phones and (electronic!) tablets.
After I complete the initial transliterations of the textual witnesses, I plan to use the tools at ORACC to lemmatize every word in the corpus, which will lay the foundation for linguistic searches, making grammatical and text-linguistic research on the corpus much easier. The project also envisions using software to create a content tagging system that will index the ritual content and gestures within each prayer (and perhaps thematic motifs). This searchable index will enhance the usefulness of the prayer corpus to researchers in fields such as Comparative Religion (e.g., to study the role of penance and contrition in various religious traditions) and Ritual Studies (e.g., to investigate the use of the body in ritual acts).
As one can see, I have a tremendous amount of work to do on the project, which will occupy me for many years to come.
How many prayers are now online? How often is the website updated?
The answer to the first question is complicated. The project currently recognizes 137 distinct prayers, which uses Mayer’s numbering system to identify them. In keeping with the standards of CDLI and ORACC, each of these prayers also has a unique Q-number to identify it.
For example, Marduk 4 is Q006103. My list of prayers, however, should be considered preliminary, a working list rather than a definitive one, for several reasons. First, deciding what counts as a distinct prayer is not always so obvious. In the past, some of the tablets thought to be a witness to a distinct prayer have turned out in fact to be a duplicate of some other prayer (see, e.g., Tašmetu 4, 5, and 6, which are now recognized as belonging to Tašmetu 2). And, some of the identified prayers are so similar to one another that they can hardly be counted as really distinct (see, e.g., the witness to Marduk 3, which, aside from using Marduk’s name, is basically identical to Ea 1a). Also, some of the prayers in the list are only known by their first line, which a scribe wrote as a catchline at the end of a tablet or as an incipit in a tablet of ritual instructions. Finally, not all of the prayers in my list can be positively identified as a šuila because witnesses to the prayer do not include a rubric labeling it as such. Following Frechette, I have included prayers that look šuila-like—so far. At some point, I will have to revisit this issue and make some decisions about what counts and what doesn’t. This really is a work in progress.
As for updating: Work on this project was my number one research priority for several years. Since March 2018, I have kept a running log of the main updates to the project here. As one can see, 2018 and 2019 were very active years; 2020 and 2021 less so. When the pandemic started in spring 2020 and I started working remotely and teaching online from my home office, I made the decision to prioritize working on my monograph on the interpretation of Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi that I had been inching along since 2010. As a result, I have not made any updates to CASPo for about a year now. But, I should have a full draft of my monograph finished by late summer and will then turn my full attention again to CASPo.
You also created a second website, “Akkadian Prayer Miscellany”. Can you tell us something about that, as well?
I had planned to write a chapter in my monograph dealing with the interpretation of Ludlul in which I would compare the poem to the themes, vocabulary, and imagery of a number of longer Akkadian prayers and laments. Others have done this with the Old Babylonian “Man and His God,” but I had plans to compare Ludlul to over a dozen prayers that I thought were relevant (e.g., the OB “Ishtar-Baghdad” and “Prayer to Anuna”). Since several of these prayers only had one textual witness, I thought I would post my work on these texts (and a few others) in a subproject to CASPo, which I have called “Akkadian Prayer Miscellany.” As one can see from the short list of texts in the project, many of the editions were posted in 2020 and early 2021. When it came time last summer to write the chapter for the book, I collated all of the data I had acquired while reading all of these texts (and many others not online), and I realized that it didn’t make sense to write up the results in one little chapter. That’s how research goes sometimes. And so, I plan to write articles on several of these prayers in the future, as I did not too long ago for a Neo-Assyrian prayer to Nabû.
How are these two websites connected to your research and work as a Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies?
As most of my American colleagues who do not teach at a research university can attest, my teaching and research are not always closely related to one another. Although I am a scholar of Ancient Near Eastern Studies, I am not really a professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies. For example, I have never taught Akkadian at University of the Pacific, and I do not have undergraduate or graduate students taking classes with me who are focused or “majoring,” as we say in the American system, in Ancient Near Eastern Studies.
I was originally hired as a kind of bridge between two departments that the university had recently merged into a Religious and Classical Studies department. I was to teach Hebrew Bible, comparative religion, theories of religion, and a survey of ancient Near Eastern history before Alexander the Great, which I have taught only about every five years. I was also hired to teach first year writing seminars, which have been a lot of fun but often included discussing content with my students that was quite distant from my areas of research expertise. For example, I led a seminar for a few years in which we read Mesopotamian mythological texts in translation as a preamble to think about American political mythology. In the spring of 2021, I led a seminar on the sociology of atheism. And last fall semester, I led a seminar on the role of the Humanities in higher education, in which we read Martha Nussbaum’s book Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities and then three science fiction novels to reflect on how and what one learns in the classroom reading and discussing fiction with one’s peers and to test Nussbaum’s ideas about the value of the Humanities.
Shortly after I was granted tenure in 2012, the Classicists retired and I became a bridge to nowhere! When a colleague left the university a few years ago, I added New Testament Introduction to my teaching. And now that the Religious Studies Department is closing, I have (very fortunately) been accepted into the History Department’s faculty, where I will add World History and surveys of ancient Greece and Rome to my teaching rotation.
Teaching occupies the majority of my time as a professor at Pacific. My research takes place when I am not teaching, preparing to teach, or grading papers, which may help colleagues understand the pace of progress on CASPo over the last ten years.
Teaching so much and so broadly presents difficulties for maintaining one’s research specialization. But, I think my teaching experience has helped me become more interdisciplinary in my thinking about things Assryiological (see, e.g., the prayer to Nabû article mentioned above). I hope to demonstrate further the very rich rewards of such interdisciplinarity in future articles based on the prayers in my Akkadian Prayer Miscellany and in the development of CASPo.
What do you think is the key to a successful academic project in Near Eastern Studies?
The most important professional ingredients are probably institutional support and a strong source of funding to support graduate or post-doctoral students who can help with the work. I only have the first ingredient; I am unlikely ever to have the second, unless I move to a research university. (To my Italian colleagues: I would definitely consider a research position in Italy, my great grandfather’s birthplace!) Still, even without a lot of funding, I think one can make a solid contribution to the field by leveraging the most important personal ingredients for a successful project: patience, hard work, and persistence. Few projects in our field can be completed successfully without a commitment measured in years.