Melanie Gross on August 27, 16:00-16:20 in session 2: Prosopographical work.
ABSTRACT: Prosobab: Online Prosopography of Babylonia (620-330 BCE)
This paper presents the online “Prosopography of Babylonia: 620–330 BCE” which is currently being developed at Leiden University within the framework of the ERC project “Persia and Babylonia”.
Thousands of cuneiform clay texts have survived in archives of Babylonian families and temples (c. 620–330 BCE). These sources offer valuable data for socio-historical research into a pivotal period of Mesopotamian history. The Leiden project wants to contribute to the accessibility of this data by developing an online prosopography, providing information about attested individuals in Babylonia during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods based on a questionnaire. As an open access database it is intended as a research tool for specialists. At the same time it aims at contributing to a better insight into the cuneiform material for non-specialists. Moreover, it provides the flexibility and durability required by the ever on-going publication of the text corpus.
While we are still busy with adding and processing data, we publicly released the first batch of data in July 2019. In this talk we will demonstrate how Prosobab can facilitate research into the social history of Babylonia and stimulate new research questions, and how it envisages to contribute to the field of “digital prosopography”.