Thoughts on Ancient Textual Sources in their Current Digital Embodiments

The paper provides an overview on the current status of Digital Humanities projects concerned with the edition of cuneiform texts, as well as on academic education aimed at the implementation of ad-hoc digital tools for philological and historical research. It argues that basic skills in both programming languages (scripting in Python or Perl) and data visualization are becoming crucial to contemporary scholars, in order to deal with an ever increasing amount of on-line, open-access, complex information. In tum, this new way of approaching ancient textual sources must be paired with a proper conceptual framework for the digital representation of ancient texts, their encoding, and deep structure(s ). As a case study to test the potential of a scripting-oriented approach to philological research, a survey of the similarity between three large lexical repertoires is provided (Old Akkadian, Old Babylonian, and Old Assyrian): as the outcome shows a slightly more pronounced proximity of Old Akkadian to Old Babylonian, the formulation of the problem in digital terms exemplifies how the above-mentioned methodologies may contribute in achieving results in such complex domains.