[The following is a very slightly altered (addition of hyperlinks and color photographs) version of the text of an
PERSEPOLIS FORTIFICATION ARCHIVE PROJECT
2010-2011 Annual Report
Matthew W. Stolper
The
Persepolis Fortification Archive (PFA) Project continues to pursue the
two urgent goals stated and repeated in earlier Annual Reports, namely,
to make thorough records of the Archive that will sustain future
research, and to distribute the records freely and continuously
to enable current research. The records include digital images of
thousands of tablets and fragments; readings and editions of thousands
of complete and fragmentary texts in Achaemenid Elamite and Imperial Aramaic; identifications, catalog entries, collations, digital images
and drawings of the impressions of thousands of cylinder seals and stamp
seals. The team that compiles and processes these records includes
students and faculty from Chicago and other colleges and universities.
The means of distributing the results include two online applications,
InscriptiFact (see http://www.inscriptifact.com/) and OCHRE (see http://ochre.lib.uchicago.edu/). As of mid-2011, the PFA Project has made
usable records of more than 8,000 Persepolis Fortification tablets and
fragments, and has made partial or complete records of almost 3,000 of
them publicly available. The goal of a comprehensive record of the
Archive is within reach. If it is accomplished it will sustain a
generation of research on the languages, art, institutions, society, and
history of the Achaemenid empire.
Image Capture
Thanks
to continuing support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
(http://www.mellon. org/) and emergency help from the Farhang Foundation
(http://www.farhang.org/) during a gap between grants, the
collaboration between the PFA Project at the Oriental Institute and the
West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California
(http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp/) continues to capture and process
very high-quality images of Persepolis Fortification tablets and
fragments at increasing rates and with increasing quality. As the
previous reports on the Project have described and illustrated — and as
readers can see for themselves via InscriptiFact and OCHRE — many of
these images are made with Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) technology, a
kind of Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) that gives the end
user dynamic control over the apparent lighting in the image, allowing
optimum viewing of features impressed on or in the tablet surface, like
cuneiform signs and seal impressions; many others are made with a
large-format, high-resolution BetterLight scanning camera, using
polarized and filtered light to reveal details not easily seen in
ordinary daylight, for example, faded ink traces, or ink obscured by
surface discoloration. During 2010–11, Clinton Moyer (PhD 2009,
Cornell), Miller Prosser (PhD 2011, NELC), and John Walton (PhD 2011,
NELC) documented more than 700 tablets and fragments with one or both of
these methods, making more than 6,000 new PTM sets of more than 640
pieces, and more than 3,500 new BetterLight scans of more than 130
pieces.
This
phase of the Project gives highest priority to the categories of
Fortification documents that have previously not been recorded and
published, namely, the tablets with monolingual Aramaic texts
accompanied by seal impressions, and the tablets with seal impressions
unaccompanied by any texts. By mid-2011 more than 3,100 items were
recorded with one or both of these kinds of imagery, including more than
690 Aramaic tablets, more than 1,800 uninscribed tablets, and more than
650 Elamite cuneiform tablets (about 220 of them also bearing short
epigraphs in Aramaic).
InscriptiFact
team members Marilyn Lundberg and Kenneth Zuckerman came to the
Oriental Institute twice to train PFA Project imaging personnel in the
use of a recently developed technique called Highlight-RTI. This is a
method of capturing PTMs without the domed apparatus that the Project
uses for Fortification tablets. Instead, one uses a stationary camera,
Figure
1. Highlight-RTI imaging of Khorsabad relief in the Oriental Institute
Museum: Clinton Moyer (left) and Miller Prosser move the light; Kenneth
Zuckerman (back to camera) controls camera and light; reflective red
ball at base of relief registers light position
Figure
2. PTM image of inscription from Khorsabad relief in the Oriental
Institute Museum, obtained by Highlight-RTI method and displayed with
InscriptiFact’s stand-alone PTM Viewer (described in last year’s Annual
Report)
a moving hand-held light, and a shiny
black or red ball placed near the object. In a series of shots made with
different lighting angles, the shiny ball registers a reflection, which
software uses to establish the light positions, allowing PTM processing
software to combine a series of shots into the final interactive PTM
image. This technique is especially suitable for recording larger
objects and immovable objects, like the Oriental Institute’s Assyrian
reliefs (figs. 1–2).
As mentioned in last year’s Annual Report,
grants from the Iran Heritage Foundation (http://www.iranheritage.org/)
allowed the PFA Project to install two PTM post-processing stations at
the Oriental Institute, where student workers Lori Calabria, Megaera
Lorenz, Gregory Hebda (all NELC), Joshua Elek (Divinity), Amy Genova,
and Daniel Whittington (both Classics) at Chicago complemented image
processing done at USC by Bekir Gurdil, Claire Shriver, and Ashley
Sands. By mid-2011, about 85 percent of the high-quality images had been
processed, all but eliminating a backlog of several years’ standing.
Calabria, Elek, Genova, Hebda, Lorenz, and Whittington, as well as Alexander Kornienko (Classics) and Tytus Mikolajczak (NELC) also made about 10,000 new conventional digital images of about 1,650 more Elamite cuneiform tablets and fragments.
Among them are some of those designated PF, published by the late
Richard T. Hallock in his magisterial Persepolis Fortification Tablets (OIP 92 [1969]), many of those designated PF-NN, which the Project is
preparing for publication, and many of those designated Fort., hitherto
entirely unrecorded. By mid-2011, more than 5,500 Elamite documents had
been recorded with ten to twenty conventional digital images each. After
a complete review of earlier conventional images, these workers also
continue the supplementary re-photography mentioned in last year’s Annual Report to fill in gaps in the image record.
Conservation and Storage
A
timely grant from the PARSA Community Foundation
(http://www.parsacf.org/) allowed the PFA Project to address two urgent
concerns, tablet conservation and data storage.
Since
autumn 2009, when the Project lost the services of seasoned conservator
Monica Hudak, we have been without a full-time tablet conservator. This
was a grave problem, since many of the Persepolis tablets can be
recorded only after skilled cleaning and stabilization. Robyn Haynie
joined the Project in May 2011 to close this gap. She comes to the
Project with a degree from the eminent conservation program of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, academic background
in Egyptology, and field experience in Greece and Turkey. A backlog of
several hundred Persepolis items was waiting for her attention, and she
began immediately to process the first batch and return the tablets and
fragments to the editorial and imaging stream (fig. 3).
Figure 3. PFA Project conservator Robyn Haynie cleans a Persepolis Fortification tablet under binocular microscope (acquired with an earlier grant from the PARSA Community Foundation)
Figure
4. Left: extended basement storage of processed Fortification tablets.
Right: PFA Project editor Annalisa Azzoni at work in subterranean
seclusion
By
the autumn of 2010, the accumulation of thirty-eight terabytes of
editorial and image data had exceeded the capacity of the Project’s
dedicated server, maintained by systems administrator Elijah Buck at
Humanities Computing. At the beginning of 2011, the addition of more
than twenty terabytes of storage relieved the strain. As of mid-2011 the
server holds about forty-five terabytes of Project data. This includes
not only processed images and editions for online distribution, but also
raw and intermediate images, scanned manuscripts and documents, and
other tools used by Project editorial staff.
The
growing number and volume of tablets and fragments recorded by imaging
and editorial teams also began to strain the Project’s physical storage
capacity. Oriental Institute archivist John Larson and preparator Erik
Lindahl made several banks of storage drawers available for PFA Project
use, and in June 2011 Project editors Annalisa Azzoni, Mark Garrison,
and Wouter Henkleman reorganized tablet storage in the Project’s
basement workspace (adding some decorative color to relieve the spartan
gloom of the former photographic darkroom, fig. 4).
Digital
storage capacity and physical storage capacity will both be recurrent
problems, but they are welcome problems in the sense that they are the
consequences of progress toward the Project’s foremost goals.
Editorial
During
two more spells of work at the Oriental Institute, PFA Project editor
Wouter Henkelman (Free University of Amsterdam) continued to collate
Elamite Fortification documents known from preliminary editions by
Richard Hallock (PF-NN), preparing corrected, annotated editions and
translations. The last such texts to be treated are the complex
registers, documents that belong to formal types that Hallock designated
as “journals” and “accounts.” These registers compile, tabulate, and
digest large amounts of information transferred from shorter memoranda
in simpler formats on smaller tablets. Being larger, the registers are
often more severely damaged than the memoranda; being denser and more
complex, their damaged passages are often harder to reconstruct; being
produced by the later phases of the information stream that the
Fortification Archive records, they are of prime importance to
understanding the Archive as a whole. For all these reasons, collating
and editing these documents is slow going. By mid-2011, Henkelman had
processed all but the last thirty-five of them in preparation for final
publication. Editions and images of many are available on OCHRE.
I
supplement these finished editions with preliminary editions of
previously unexamined Elamite tablets and fragments, to be revised and
collated with Henkelman. I give greatest attention to the journals and
accounts, because they are numerically underrepresented in the published
sample of the PFA. As of mid-2011, I had recorded about 750 new Elamite texts, among them about 400 registers. NELC student worker Tytus Mikolajczak re-read about forty-five of these with me, making corrections, adding editorial and analytical
notes, and supplying or verifying identifications of seals. Such new
documents fill in more and more slots in the dense matrix of PFA data,
and they also continue to yield surprises to delight the philologist,
historian, and general tablet nerd — rare or entirely new Elamite and
Old Iranian words, phrases, constructions and contents, and/or new
seals.
I
also continue to pore over the boxes of unrecorded tablets and
fragments in a process of triage, to select Elamite tablets and
fragments for conservation, photography, and/or reading.
The
extraordinary harvest of Achaemenid art from the impressions of seals
on Persepolis Fortification tablets continues to flourish under the
overall supervision of PFA Project editor Mark Garrison (Trinity
University). During six more visits to the Oriental Institute, Garrison
systematically examined 275 more of the boxes of unprocessed tablets and
fragments and selected 800 more uninscribed, sealed tablets that merit
cataloging and recording. By mid2011, he had examined more than
two-thirds of the approximately 2,600 boxes and accumulated a collection
of nearly 3,000 analytically useful tablets. Post-doctoral researcher
Sabrina Maras (University of California, Berkeley) continues to catalog
some of this material under Garrison’s direction, processing about 170
tablets during 2010–11. Student workers visiting from other institutions
are also doing preliminary cataloging under Garrison’s direction: Jenn
Finn (PhD candidate, Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and
Archaeology, University of Michigan) in July and August 2010, Jenny
Kreiger (PhD candidate in the same program at Michigan), and Erin Daly
(undergraduate, Cornell College) beginning in June 2011 (fig. 5).
During
2010–11 Garrison and his team identified almost 200 new seals from
impressions on the uninscribed tablets, for a running total of almost
500 new seals in this subcorpus. Working with Mikolajczak, Garrison also examined about 300 more of the Elamite tablets
texts
being edited by Henkelman to verify seal identifications. They
cataloged more than 140 more new seals, for a running total of nearly
600 new seals from review of about two-thirds of this subcorpus. Almost
2,800 distinct seals have been identified so far from impressions on
Persepolis Fortification tablets. As last year’s Annual Report emphasized,
each of these seals represents the activity of a distinct individual or
office, as distinct as a signature, and the whole corpus of seals is a
collection of Achaemenid art without parallel for its size, range and
precise context.
Working
with research assistants at Trinity University, Garrison scanned final
drawings of seals known from impressions on published tablets. All the
scans of final drawings (and some of preliminary drawings) are available
on the Project server to Project members working on all the subcorpora
of the Archive. Garrison and his assistants have also begun to upload
the drawings, accompanied with iconographic data, to OCHRE, where they
can be linked to online display of the tablets. By mid-2011, they had
entered about 320 of the seals, mostly those that appear in the two
as-yet unpublished volumes of the ongoing publication of the seals on
published Elamite Fortification tablets (the first volume, Oriental Institute Publication 117, by Garrison and Margaret Cool Root
[University of Michigan], is available at http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/catalog/oip/oip117.html).
Figure 5. Jenny Kreiger (University of Michigan, foreground) and Erin Daly (Cornell College) classifying and cataloging uninscribed, sealed Fortification tablets
During
five more visits to the Oriental Institute, Project editor Annalisa
Azzoni (Vanderbilt University) cataloged seventy more monolingual
Aramaic tablets and fragments, for a running total of 738, all entered
in OCHRE with preliminary readings and notes. Azzoni reviewed and
formatted editions of fifty more of these for public distribution on
OCHRE. Project editor Elspeth Dusinberre (University of Colorado),
assisted in Chicago by student worker Emily Wilson (Classics),
updated OCHRE records of 475 seals identified from impressions on the
first 530 of the monolingual Aramaic Fortification texts (that is, all
the Aramaic tablets recorded with autographed copies and draft editions
by the late Raymond A. Bowman), completed final inked drawings of twenty
of them and template drawings of more than forty more. Azzoni also
examined all the known Aramaic epigraphs on Elamite Fortification
tablets, the second major Aramaic subcorpus of the PFA. Of more than 220
epigraphs identified so far, she entered ninety for public distribution
on OCHRE.
Distribution
During
2010–11, InscriptiFact Project members Marilyn Lundberg and Leta Hunt
cataloged and uploaded more than 7,400 BetterLight scans and more than
2,700 PTM sets to display more than 530 additional Fortification tablets
to the InscriptiFact database application. InscriptiFact is available
for free download on application at http://www.inscriptifact.com/. As of
mid-2011, users can view online or download for local use more than
17,000 high-resolution static images and more than 4,000 high-resolution
PTM sets, documenting 1,060 Persepolis Fortification tablets. These
include most of the Aramaic texts in the Archive (apart from Aramaic
inscriptions in seal impressions): 688 of the 738 monolingual Aramaic
tablets identified so far, and 185 of about 220 Aramaic epigraphs
identified so far on cuneiform texts.
Oriental
Institute post-doctoral worker Dennis Campbell continues to carry out
the cluster of interlocking tasks involved in uploading, error-checking,
and linking PFA texts, images and cataloging information for display in
the On-Line Cultural Heritage Environment (OCHRE, available for free
download at http://ochre.lib.uchicago.edu/index_files/Page494.htm),
assisted by student workers Seunghee Yie (NELC), Wayne Munsch
(Divinity), and Özgün Sak (History). More than 4,000 Elamite texts have
been entered, more than 2,250 of them now publicly available. All of the
known monolingual Aramaic tablets have been entered. More than 2,000 of
the Elamite and Aramaic texts have associated images. More than 1,700
of the uninscribed tablets have been entered with basic cataloging and
descriptive information, and more than 1,000 of them with linked
screen-resolution PTM images.
Munsch
has imported and edited images of about 400 Elamite tablets on OCHRE,
and tagged about 2,000 of the images, linking the texts sign-by-sign to
edited transliterations, and linking seal impressions to catalog entries
and collated drawings of the seals. As new texts are entered, Yie
continually revises and corrects Elamite glossary entries and the
underlying text editions, and Campbell revises and corrects Aramaic
glossary entries and the underlying text editions. This process
underscores a notable property of the languages of the Fortification
texts: of more than 3,000 lemmas in the Elamite and Aramaic glossaries
so far, more than 70 percent are proper names. Considering that the
texts are terse administrative records, this comes as no surprise, but
it is startling to realize that this large corpus — the largest in
Achaemenid Elamite and one of the largest in Imperial Aramaic — relies
on scarcely a thousand items of common Elamite, Iranian-Elamite,
Aramaic, and Iranian-Aramaic vocabulary, and it is sobering to recognize
how much more of these languages we cannot know.
As
the texts are cleaned up, those with explicit dates are linked to time
periods (regnal years of Darius I, month when explicit, and modern
expressions of ancient dates). This will allow users to include time as a
variable in complex searches when examining patterns in choice of
signs, choice of words, syntactic choices, volumes of commodities, and
other matters.
The
University of Chicago Library has upgraded the hardware that powers the
PFA on OCHRE, and Internet data specialist Sandra Schloen, one of the
creators of OCHRE, has upgraded the software. The results include faster
processing, better internal indexing, and new
Figure
6. OCHRE Comprehensive View of PFS 0009*, a seal of Parnaka, the chief
administrator of the Fortification administration, with his name in
Aramaic engraved in the seal scene. The View shows a list of 160
impressions by tablet number and surface and by text number (left), with
thumbnails of available images (right), and an opened link to show the
collated seal drawing (center). Clicking on a text link opens an edition
of the text associated with the particular impression
Figure 7. OCHRE
query facility under development: search produces list of all inscribed
cylinder seals; clicking on first-entry, PFATS 0007* (an inscribed seal
first documented on Aramaic Fortification tablets), opens a terse
catalog entry
functionality.
New view formats include the “Comprehensive View,” available for each
seal in the Catalog of Seals, offering a concise presentation of each
documented impression of the seal (including images) on tablets of all
types, along with linked details of each tablet and its textual contents
(if any) (fig. 6). A new query facility, still under development,
allows a wide and flexible range of complex searches of properties of
tablets, scripts, transliterations, translations, glossaries, seal
impressions, seals, seal inscriptions, etc. (fig. 7).
Publications and Presentations
PFA
Project staff members completed more than thirty-five articles, book
chapters, and books based largely or entirely on PFA Project results.
Publications that appeared in 2010–11 include Garrison’s article on “The
Seal of ‘Kuraš the Anzanite, Son of Šešpeš (Teispes),’ PFS 93*:
Susa-Anšan-Persepolis,” and Henkelman’s article on “Parnaka’s Feast: šip in Parsa and Elam,” both in Elam and Persia,
edited by J. Alvarez-Mon and Mark Garrison (Eisenbrauns, 2011),
Henkelman’s article on “‘Consumed Before the King,’ the Table of Darius,
that of Irdabama and Irtaštuna, and that of his Satrap, Karkiš,” in the
conference volume Der Achämenidenhof/ The Achaemenid Court , edited by Bruno Jacobs and Robert Rollinger, Clasica et Orientalia 2 (Harrassowitz,
2010), and “The First Achaemenid Administrative Document Discovered at
Persepolis,” by Charles E. Jones (Institute for the Study of the Ancient
World, New York University) and Seunghee Yie, mentioned in last year’s Annual Report and now available online at http://www.achemenet.com/document/2011.003-Jones&Yie.pdf.
The
Project’s weblog (http://persepolistablets.blogspot.com/, or on
Facebook at http:// www.facebook.com/pages/Persepolis-Fortification-Archive-Project/116290391782963),
with sixteen new posts, was viewed more than 16,000 times during
2010–11 by more than 10,000 unique visitors.
Academic
lectures and conference presentations by PFA Project members during
2010-11 included Azzoni’s talk on “Aramaic at Persepolis” at the annual
meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Society of Biblical Literature in
Atlanta, November 2010, and her lecture on “Digitizing the Past” at
Loyola University of New Orleans in March 2011; a presentation by
Garrison on “Observations on Persepolitan Glyptic and the Seal of
Aršama,” and six presentations by Henkelman on the PFA, its contents,
its historical and sociolinguistic implications, all at series of
workshops at Oxford in January, February, and May 2011; papers by Mikolajczakon "Visual Aspects of Accounting Seals of the PFA" and by me on "'His Own Death' at Bisotun and Persepolis,” both at the annual meeting of the American Oriental Society in Chicago in March 2011; and my keynote lecture on the PFA and
the Project at a symposium on “Archaeologies of Text: Archaeology,
Technology and Ethics,” at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University, December 2010.
Among
several local presentations, my keynote presentation on “Electronic
Epigraphy to the Rescue of the Persepolis Fortification Archive,” at the
Umbrella Initiative Faculty Technology, tried to let members of the
University of Chicago community who are not part of the Oriental
Institute’s ordinary constituency know that the work of the Oriental
Institute belongs to the mainstream of the University’s research mission
in terms that are both technically adept and culturally responsible.
Conclusion
Another
way in which the PFA Project carries out the University’s mission is by
supporting students who will populate the next generation of
scholarship. Six graduate student workers have completed PhDs during the
life of the Project, in fields that include Assyriology, Hittitology,
Northwest Semitic philology (including Miller Prosser in 2011) and
Hebrew Bible material
(including entirely original documentation), already the basis for two
presentations at national meetings. Siwei Wang (Computer Science, PhD
2011) surmises that her investigation of PTM technology while
volunteering for the PFA Project helped her earn a post-doctoral
fellowship working on the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National
Laboratories. Undergraduate Project workers have gone on to graduate
programs elsewhere, and in 2010–11 at least two of them (Elizabeth
Davidson, Coptic and Early Christianity, Yale University; Ivan Cangemi,
Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Program in Classical Art and
Archaeology, University of Michigan) have reached PhD candidacy. As
already mentioned, students from other colleges and universities have
come to Chicago for summer work on the Project.
In
this way, the aims, methods, accomplishments and temperament of the PFA
Project contribute to the formation of scholars whose careers will take
them far beyond the Project’s topical focus. Unfortunately, some of
them are moving forward in their careers before the Project is complete.
This year, Clinton Moyer, the senior member of the high-resolution
imaging team, who has been a key to developing and implementing its
growing repertoire of methods, leaves to take up a post-doctoral
fellowship at Wake Forest University, and John Walton, also part of the
high-resolution imaging group, leaves for a teaching post at the
University of Northern Iowa (fig. 8).
Figure
8. PFA Project staff at farewell reception for departing workers. Left
to right: Ben Thomas (NELC), Miller Prosser (PhD NELC, 2011), Annalisa
Azzoni (Vanderbilt University), Stolper and Baxter, Clinton Moyer (PhD
Cornell, 2009), Erin Daly (Cornell College), Wouter Henkelman (Free
University of Amsterdam), and John Walton (PhD NELC, 2011). Walton’s
shirt shows the emblem of the Persepolis Football Club
In
spring 2011 came two pieces of good news that underscore the priorities
of the PFA Project and that bode well for accomplishing the Project’s
goals. First, after long deliberation, a Federal appellate court panel
handed down rulings on two motions in the lawsuit that still looms over
the future of the tablets (see David Glenn, “U. of Chicago and Museums
Win Key Ruling in Legal Battle over Iranian Antiquities,” Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle. com/article/U-of-ChicagoMuseums-Win/126923/).
Although these rulings are favorable to the Oriental Institute’s
position, it is important to realize that they concern procedural
issues. The substantive legal issue remains to be determined by a trial
on the merits and the date of that trial is not yet fixed. Thus, the
urgency of the threat to the PFA is diminished but the substance of the
threat remains. Whatever the outcome, the Oriental Institute will
ultimately surrender custodial control of the Persepolis Fortification
tablets, so a complete record of the PFA remains a compelling need.
Second,
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the PARSA Community Foundation, and
the National Endowment for the Humanities (http://www.neh.gov/) renewed
large grants to the PFA Project. These, along with supporting grants
from the Iran Heritage Foundation and the Farhang Foundation and gifts
from individual donors, will sustain our work at the present levels for
the immediate future, bringing the goal of a complete record of the PFA
within reach. As we proceed, the PFA Project continues to reveal the
rich potential of the Archive’s data for understanding the languages,
art, and society of the Achaemenid Persian empire, and the intimate
connections among them.
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This Annual Report is republished here with the kind permission of the Oriental Institute
Membership Office. The
Oriental Institute Annual Reports are
available for members as one of the privileges of membership. They are
not for sale to the general public. They contain yearly summaries of the
activities of the Institute’s faculty, staff, and research projects, as
well as descriptions of special events and other Institute functions.
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