CMAwRo Online

The CMAwRo website: http://oracc.org/cmawro/corpus.

Oracc context of CMAwRo

The online corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals (CMAwRo) is hosted on Oracc, the Open Richly-Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, steered by Eleanor Robson, Steve Tinney, and Niek Veldhuis.

At present, CMAwRo comprises the compositions edited in the first and second volumes of CMAwR, and Abusch' Maqlû. The ‘master text’ of each composition, as well as the individual manuscripts on which the master texts are based, have been converted to the Oracc-format and subsequently ‘lemmatized’ (i.e., lexically annotated), thus creating an online glossary of the attested words, names, places, etc. On the CMAwRo website http://oracc.org/cmawro/corpus, the master texts can be read, both in transliteration and translation; their scores can be retrieved; the glossaries searched.

Using CMAwRo

The whole corpus of anti-witchcraft texts is organized in twelve groups as laid out in CMAwR 1, 10–16:

1. Prescriptions for undoing witchcraft
2. Prescriptions to be used for bewitched persons
3. Prescriptions for symptoms indicating witchcraft
4. Cures for the witchcraft-induced loss of potency
5. Protecting pregnant women and infants against witchcraft
6. Instructions for the fabrication of amulet necklaces against witchcraft
7. Ušburruda texts
8. Ceremonial rituals for undoing witchcraft
9. Anti-witchcraft incantations within Bīt rimki and related texts
10. Rituals against zikurudû and other special types of witchcraft
11. Rituals in case of evil omens indicating witchcraft
12. Diagnostic texts
A. Additional texts
Maqlû

Some of these groups are not yet present in volumes 1 and 2, others are incomplete, but with the publication of the final volume these gaps will be filled. Moreover, when additional manuscripts are identified, they are added to the relevant master text online (see, e.g., texts 1.1, 1.6, 1.8 and 8.5).

The CMAwRo website

The CMAwRo website has three parts: the blue header at the top, the outliner pane under the header to the left and the main pane to its right.

The header

The top buttons from left to right, top to bottom:

("help"): the Oracc help page will pop up, with a more extensive explanation of the functionality of Oracc than the one provided here;
("reset pager"): takes you back to the list of texts or the glossary;
("more resources"): opens the project hub (see below) where you get the possibility to check the different glossaries;
the Oracc Search: you can look for words or signs in Akkadian, Sumerian or English (see below);
("search");
: with this button you can hide the left pane (or bring it back);
("toggle page/item view"): you can switch between the list of texts/glossary items and the individual text/lemma;
Item box : to go from one item to the previous or the next one. You can also specify the item by number;
English only: when looking at a text, you can opt to see only its English translation.

Search CMAwRo

Search tips

Searching is possible with Unicode characters. If you prefer to work in ASCII however, you should follow these conventions:

' = alef
j = ŋ
s, = tsade
sz = shin
t, = tet
0-9=₀-₉

The index numbers follow the reading, e.g, SZA3.

Searching the transcriptions: use ḫ (h with breve below)!

When searching for Akkadian words in the normalized version of the texts, it is important to use the correct length marks over vowels (ā, ē, ī, ū, â, ê, î, û) and the letter ḫ (h with breve below). When you want to find the word kišpī, for example, you have to enter kišpī with long ī. You can use wildcards to get less precise searches, as, e.g., kišp*.

Searching the transliterations: use a simple H (Ḫ won’t work)!

When you want to find a certain sequence of signs, you can make use of the following search options:

s: SIGN NAME (s colon, followed by the sign name in capital letters), e.g., s:UGU finds written forms in Akkadian with muḫ or eli, and in Sumerian with ugu. It does not find logographic spellings with UGU.
l: LOGOGRAM (l colon, followed by the specific logographic reading in capital letters), e.g., l:UGU finds all written forms with logographic UGU.

The use of hyphens, underscores and tildes between signs expands the search possibilities greatly.

hyphen (-): connects signs within a word
underscore (_): finds signs in adjacent words
tilde (~): finds adjacent signs (within a word AND in adjacent words)

Searching the translations: !tra

If you want to find all attestations of an English word, you can simply search for it, introducing your search with !tra. Thus, if you want to find the goddess Ištar in the transcriptions, you search for: Ištar; if you want to find her in the translations, search for: !tra Ištar.

Searching the glossaries

When looking for a specific word regardless of its spelling, check the online glossaries.

For more information on Oracc's general search principles, see http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/search/searchingcorpora/index.html.

The outliner pane & main pane

Browsing the texts online is self-explanatory. By clicking on one of the groups in the left pane of the website’s home page http://oracc.org/cmawro/corpus, all texts within this group will be listed in the right, main pane. Clicking on the text number or title will bring up the requested transliteration and translation. From here, it is but a simple step to retrieve the full score of the composition (by clicking "score" in the left pane). Alternatively, you can also retrieve the score of a single line of text by clicking on the line number before the transliteration.

Clicking on words within the transliteration or the score brings up their glossary entry.