June 15, 2014

Good evening. Your Grace; Mr.Dekaelaita; Mr. Mando, President of the ANCI; Mr. Ashurian; Mr. Youmaran; Dr. Yalda; my dear friend Dr. Solkah; Friends of the Assyrian community of Chicago. I've been asked to say a few words about the great project you are so graciously honoring tonight, the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, known simply among scholars in the field as "the Dictionary," is a monumental lexicographical project that began in 1921 at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. Some 35 years later, its first volume was published in 1956 and its final and 26th volume was published another 55 years later, in 2011.

Those of us of a certain generation usually still think of a Dictionary is a single handy book on our shelves, a "compilation and definition of a given word store." Dictionary-making is a curious enterprise. It is impelled by an intellectual curiosity about the world around us, by the desire to organize the words that define that world, to codify the information and place it in a systematic and retrievable, accessible form.

There are, of course, many different kinds of dictionary. There are monolingual and multilingual (or polyglot); general, slang, and technical; unabridged and abridged; academic and commercial; dictionaries for native speakers and for foreign learners; reverse dictionaries and crossword solvers' dictionaries; and dictionaries produced by a solo compiler and those (like the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary) produced by a team.

Of course, each dictionary, ancient or modern, draws upon its predecessors. The early editors and planners of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary project did not invent their methodology out of whole cloth. They relied on the accumulated wisdom of centuries of European lexicographic traditions. They also drew on millennia of ancient word organizations. For example, it was not a given that our Dictionary be organized according to a strict Latin alphabet a-b-c sequence, rather than, say, according to Semitic roots.

One model of organization that was common in the European Late Middle Ages alphabetized only by first letter. My own library shelves are organized this way: all the authors whose names start with A, or B, or C, are together.

And the alphabet is not the only way to organize a dictionary, any more than it is the only way to organize your books. With books, some people organize by subject -- poetry over there, fiction there, biographies there; or by height -- tall books on lower shelves; or by frequency of use -- oft-consulted volumes nearer to hand.

So too, a common way of organizing a dictionary is by thematic or topical units. We are familiar with this in our modern "thesaurus" works, most famously Roget's Thesaurus, that construct "trees" with "branches" and "twigs" each of which covers a thematic unit: verbs of motion, furniture, colors, natural or celestial phenomena, and so on. And because one word, in its various senses and uses, can fit into more than one thematic unit, individual words are repeated in a thesaurus, resulting in a useful but complex system of cross-listing and cross-referencing.

Indeed, the ancient Mesopotamian scholars organized some their word-lists in this "natural" way, more than 4000 years ago. One ancient organization of the known world is an enormous thematic compilation with 24 tablets, or chapters, with over 10,000 entries covering topical or thematic areas of both the natural and man-made world, such as: legal and administrative terms; tree names; wooden artifacts; reeds and reed artifacts; pottery; hides or leather artifacts; metals; domestic animals; wild animals; parts of the human body; stone names; plant names; birds and fish; and more. Other smaller compositions are devoted to single themes: god names; stone names; pharmacological items; human physical and psychological terms; etc. Eventually, the corpus of ancient lexical lists included lists that provided synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, and simple and compound logograms.

Now we jump ahead four thousand years to the early twentieth-century, the formative years of our Chicago Assyrian Dictionary project.

The early decades of the Assyrian Dictionary project were devoted mostly to data gathering, assembling the published and unpublished texts into usable editions: medical treatises, legal compilations, literary epics, etc., etc. Millions of file cards were parsed from these editions and filed in banks of cabinets. These banks of files were the material for the next stage, the actual writing of the Dictionary articles.

An important source for any Dictionary comes from the tradition of consulting previous dictionaries. In our own case, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary drew heavily in its earliest volumes in the 1950's on the glossaries and the few "concise" dictionaries then available: Friedrich Delitzsch's 1896 Assyrisches Handwrterbuch; Muss-Arnold's 1894--1905 Concise Dictionary of the Assyrian Language; and Carl Bezold's 1926 Babylonisch-Assyrisches Glossar. The editors of these first volumes of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, A. Leo Oppenheim and then Erica Reiner, soon also turned to a newer, parallel project going on in Germany, the Akkadisches Handwrterbuch, published from 1959 to 1986 by Wolfram von Soden, itself based on the earlier accumulation of files belonging to Bruno Meissner. Over the 30 years of parallel publishing, these two projects -- the 3-volume von Soden Handwrterbuch and the 26-volume Chicago Assyrian Dictionary -- constantly reacted and responded to each other in a kind of mutual competition and cooperation. In this case, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary had the first word with its first 1956 volume, and the last word with the 2011 volume.

But we know that no one ever really has the "last word." Even before our twentieth-century Dictionary was completed, other dictionary projects had begun to use the enormous potential of twenty-first century tools. The massive data bases of millions of cuneiform materials are now being harnessed to ask new questions about ancient Assyria, to organize new "dictionaries" and other resources for scholars and students to continue the crucial study of one of the world's richest, foundational, civilization, the evidence for which civilization is every hour now in ever-increasing danger of being irretrievably lost.

The publication of the last of the 26 volumes of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was achieved just over fifty years after the publication of the first volume -- a pace that one of the early members of the team, Benno Landsberger, is said to have characterized as "insane haste." The pace of knowledge growth now would have astounded those early scholars. At the University of Chicago and particularly at the Oriental Institute, new projects are attracting new scholars to tackle new questions with new tools. They, too, though, will build, as we did, on the work of their predecessors. And in this edifice of scholarship, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary will stand as a monumental foundation and accomplishment of supreme value for generations to come.

The scholars to whom we owe the greatest debt for the accomplishment of the Dictionary are no longer among us. A. Leo Oppenheim, who galvanized the project and edited 14 volumes, died in 1974; Erica Reiner, who edited another 9 volumes, died in 2005. But here tonight to celebrate with you are some of the team members who have devoted the larger part of our academic careers to seeing this enormous and enormously important project through: Robert Biggs, Jennie Myers, Matthew Stolper, and Chris Woods. And the director of the Oriental Institute, whose leadership makes all such achievements possible, Gil Stein.

We are all most grateful to the Assyrian Church of the East and to the Chicago Assyrian community for your years of support and friendship. We are honored that you invited us here tonight, but truly it is we who are indebted to you for your unswerving commitment to the scholarly study of the heritage of the ancient near east. On behalf of all my colleagues, I thank you.

Dr. Marth Roth is Dean of Humanities, University of Chicago, Professor of Assyriology and editor of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary.