In the spring of 2006, two other scholars and I received a collaborative research grant of $150,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct research on Neo-Babylonian trial law and procedure for the two-year period from July 1, 2006 until June 30, 2008. The research is well underway, and we hope to begin publishing some of our findings in the near future. The abstract for the project is below. My two collaborators are F. Rachel Magdalene (Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois) and Cornelia Wunsch (School or Oriental and African Studies, London).

Abstract

The purpose of the Neo-Babylonian Trial Procedure project is to understand and describe the features and procedures of the trial court system operative in southern Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia) during the seventh to fifth centuries BCE (the Neo-Babylonian period, approximately 650-450 BCE). This effort will entail several endeavors: (1) identifying Neo-Babylonian trial-related tablets (documents) by searching the database of Neo-Babylonian legal texts already compiled by the project's co-directors, published scholarly literature on the topic, and targeted museum collections in Europe and North America; (2) encoding a large number of these texts with the Unicode encodings for cuneiform signs; (3) analyzing these texts for legal and historical content; and (4) compiling and organizing the encoding data and the legal-historical analysis in the University of Chicago's OCHRE (On-line Cultural Heritage Research Environment) system, a Unicode-based and internet-based system designed specifically to accommodate the study of ancient Near Eastern texts and artifacts. The collection of data in OCHRE will then be analyzed in order to produce the following: (1) a written presentation of the findings in book form; (2) a CD-ROM, to be included with each book, containing data collected by means of the legal and historical analysis of the texts and accessible through a user-interface; and (3) a free website with encoded Neo-Babylonian texts, searchable by individual or sets of cuneiform signs. Finally, the scholarly contributions of this project are three-fold: (1) one of the first collections of ancient Near Eastern texts encoded in Unicode; (2) the first book-length, comprehensive study of Neo-Babylonian trial procedure that combines historical, philological, and legal-historical expertise; (3) a searchable database of legal and historical data. This work will be primarily of interest to Assyriologists and legal historians, but it will also make accessible material that is important for scholars interested in connections between the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible, Greco-Roman legal systems, and Islamic law.