ADD – Astronomical Diaries Digital

Astronomical Diaries Digital (ADD) is an FWF-funded cooperation project hosted at the Department for Near Estern Studies at the University of Vienna, led by Reinhard Pirngruber. The project edits and analyses the so called “Astronomical Diaries”, a group of Late Babylonian observational records dating between ca. 400 and 60 BCE. In addition to recording the position of the planets visible to the free eye and the path of the moon through the ecliptic, these texts describe a variety of terrestrial phenomena: local events as well as political history on a supra-regional level, the gauge of the Euphrates River and records of commodity prices, including the staple foods barley and dates. Because of this, the diaries are one of the largest collections of observed data for any period in world history before the modern era.

The project produces a digital edition of the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries, published via ORACC, the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, and uses this data to analyse the text corpus with methods from the field of Digital Humanities, carried out at the ACDH-CH. To this end, the Akkadian texts have been converted into XML and enriched with metadata (e.g., on tablet format and layout) following the TEI standard. On this new textual basis, various digital tools, such as scripts converting the Babylonian dates into dates according to the Julian-Gregorian calendar, or analyses of orthographic conventions were developed and applied to the data. The interpretation of the results allows new insights on the internal structure of the corpus as well as the phenomena within it.