Articles by Francesco Di Filippo

The paper provides an overview of the digital tools developed as part of the Ebla Digital Archives Project, which aims to offer a digital edition of roughly 3,000 cuneiform tablets from ancient Ebla (modern Tell Mardikh, in western Syria), dated to the middle of the third millennium BCE. The Ebla archive is the oldest one in the history of mankind, for which extensive information concerning the primary setting of the documents is available. The archaicity of the writing system, combined with the inherent difficulties in reconstructing languages from the remote past (Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite), pushes us to rethink the strategies to properly digitally capture the complexity of these sources, of invaluable historical significance: administrative documents, literary texts, vocabularies, letters, etc. We tackled the problem through the development of a PostgreSQL database, which is populated by ad hoc Python scripts that parse input transliteration files, which in turn are encoded using a shallow mark-up language. The individual steps in such workflow are discussed, as well as the benefits in terms of advanced queries for information retrieval that such approach offers.

This article focuses on the preliminary results of a CNR-ISMA ongoing project for the digital edition of Linear B texts, having the ultimate goal of providing scholars, and all those who are interested in the Mycenaean world, with an updated edition of these documents. LiBER (Linear B Electronic Resources) is a document management system which is able to process a variety of materials, such as the logo-syllabic script preserved by these ancient records and their physical supports, as well as to project all relevant data into a dynamic archaeological map. In particular, LiBER has been designed to manage structured texts and all the information available about their chronology, paleography and spatial distribution. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the general philosophy which lies behind the conception of this kind of enterprise and the solutions adopted for the encoding of this specific logo-syllabic script - by exploring drawbacks and potentials of descriptive markup languages and a database driven approach - and for the representation of data through dynamic maps.