Workshop: The Origins of Emesal
Helsinki, June 25-26 2025
Organisation team: Aleksi Sahala, Krister Lindén, Noah Kröll, Sebastian Fink
It is commonly agreed that the first Emesal texts originate from the second millennium while Sumerian ceased to be a vernacular around 2000 BC. This leads to the somewhat paradoxical situation that a variant of Sumerian occurred when Sumerian was already a dead language. However, varieties usually do not develop from languages that ceased to be vernaculars. So, where does Emesal come from?
The Helsinki-based project “The Origins of Emesal“ (PI Krister Lindén, funded by the Research Council of Finland), which started in 2021 and will come to an end in 2025, aims at re-addressing this question of the origin of Emesal with computational methods.
While our knowledge of Emesal has improved massively over the last decades (especially with Manfred Schretter’s magisterial “Emesal-Studien”), and many new text editions have been published in the last years, not many texts were available digitally. In the framework of “The Origins of Emesal” the ORACC-projects eISL and OBEL were established. Both OBEL and eISL made a substantial number of annotated Emesal-texts digitally available and thereby provide an easy to use open access database for further studies from various perspectives.
The question of “The Origins of Emesal” can only be answered by a combination of digital, linguistic, philological and archaeological approaches. Therefore, this workshop addresses specialists in all these disciplines to combine their knowledge and improve our answers to this vexed question.
Registration
We have a limited number of seats available for this workshop. Please fill in the registration form (here) if you are interested in attending and wait for the confirmation email. Registration will close when all seats are reserved. The last day to register is June 16.
The preliminary programme
(please, follow the news for possible updates)
Wednesday 25.06
09:00-09:45 Marcos Such-Gutiérrez (Madrid): In Search of the Emesal Dialect in the Third Millennium BC
09:45-10:30 Ami Asyag (Jerusalem): The Corpus of Prayers from Ĝirsu. The Earliest Sumerian Emesal Prayers
10:30-11:00 Coffee Break
11:00-11:45 Bernhard Schneider (Wroclaw): The Nippur Emesal Texts in their Archaeological Context
11:45-12:30 Sebastian Fink (Innsbruck): The Emesal Vocabulary of the City Laments
12:30-14:00 Lunch Break
14:00-14:45 Christie Carr (Providence): Emesal in the Love Lyrics
14:45-15:30 Noah Kröll (Göttingen): Semantic fields in Old Babylonian Emesal
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
16:00-16:45 Gordon Whittaker (Göttingen): Sumerian Sound Change as Reflected in Emesal — A Diachronic Perspective
16:45-17:30 Paul Delnero (Berlin): Local and Scribal Differences in the Writing of Emesal Evening
Thursday 26.06
09:00-09:45 Niek Veldhuis (Berkeley): The Old Babylonian Emesal Liturgies Project
09:45-10:30 Tommi Jauhiainen (Helsinki): Collecting Emesal Texts from Oracc Using Double Mutual Rank
10:30-11:00 Coffee Break
11:00-11:45 Krister Lindén (Helsinki): Using the ANEE portal and Korp to trace the usage of Emesal
11:45-12:30 Aleksi Sahala (Helsinki): Use of Emesal in the City Laments
12:30-14:00 Lunch