Searching SAA online and the Sargon correspondence

There are different ways to explore the materials of the State Archives of Assyria corpus, of which the Sargon correspondence forms a part. This page explains how.

Note that you can access the Sargon correspondence as part of the entire State Archives of Assyria corpus [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/corpus] or on its own [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/aebp/corpus]. The latter option should be used when planning to make use of the glossaries of Akkadian and names. Whenever transliterated text in the State Archives of Assyria corpus is rendered in blue (instead of black), its content has been lemmatised and is therefore part of the glossaries.

Searching transliterations, translations and catalogue

You can use the search box at the top of the Page View and Item View to search within the transliterations, translations and/or within the catalogue. Select the relevant option from the drop-down menu next to the "Search" button.

To search within the transliterations, type the sequence of signs you want to find into the search box and click "Search". Instead of the characters š, ṣ, and ṭ use the sequences sz, s,, and t, respectively - e.g. "Marduk-szumu-us,ur".

To search within the translations, type the English term you want to find into the search box and click "Search". Note that e.g. archer will produce results for both "archer" and "archers", plunder results for "plunder", "plundered" and "plundering", responsible results for "responsible" and "responsibility", etc.

To search within the catalogue, type the information you want to find into the search box and click "Search". The search engine is not case-sensitive. To search for multi-word phrases, separate the words with an underscore - e.g. ABL_100 finds ABL 0100, and K_554 finds K 00554.

For detailed instructions which will allow you to make the most of the search facilities, go to the Oracc User Guide [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/user/p2/index.html].

» Browse or search the Sargon letters. [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/aebp/corpus]

Browsing and searching the glossaries

There are two main types of glossaries generated from the Sargon correspondence [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/aebp/corpus] in State Archives of Assyria Online: Akkadian, i.e. Neo-Assyrian or Neo-Babylonian words, and proper nouns, with various sub-categories including the names of people and places.

All these glossaries work in essentially the same way and can be accessed via two routes:

Firstly, in Item View, each transliterated word in the corpus is linked to a glossary entry. When you place your cursor over the word, the outline entry pops up; when you click on the word you are taken to the full entry.
Secondly, you can access the complete glossaries by clicking on the links in the Glossaries box at the top of every Page View and Item View. For instructions on how to browse and search the glossaries, go to the Oracc User Guide [ http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/user/searching/].

Content last modified: 4 Apr 2013.