Major milestone in digital cuneiform studies: Researchers from Mainz, Marburg, and Würzburg present an innovative tool with many new possibilities
26 March 2025
JOINT PRESS RELEASE OF THE TLHdig PARTNERS
The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Boğazköy-Hattuša is located in northern Turkey. It was once the capital of the Hittite Empire, a great power in the late Bronze Age around 1650 to 1200 BC. The cuneiform tablets discovered there and in other Hittite sites represent one of the largest groups of texts from the ancient Near East. They include thousands of sources in Hittite, an early-attested Indo-European language, as well as numerous fragments in other Anatolian languages, alongside Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hurrian texts. Since 2023, an innovative digital tool has been offering researchers and students online access to these historical sources: the Thesaurus Linguarum Hethaeorum Digitalis (TLHdig 0.1), which was launched on the Hittitology Portal Mainz (HPM) platform. Ever since its initial launch, this thesaurus has become one of the digital tools that hittitologists use every day, with more than 100,000 accesses per month.
Expansion of the Tool with Many New Options
This tool is now even more powerful: In the version of TLHdig 0.2, it comprises more than 98 percent of all published sources. That is approximately 22,000 XML text documents, many of which consist of multiple rejoined fragments. The corpus currently consists of almost 400,000 transliterated lines. And there is even more to com: the full version of TLHdig, expected to go online in late 2025, will offer complete coverage of all published texts.
Researchers can use the tool to browse and search texts in transliteration or cuneiform and apply various filters for more complex queries. TLHdig is embedded in the infrastructure of the Hittitology Portal Mainz and integrated with various digital catalog tools, media databases, and text editions.
Online Pipeline for New Text Publications
TLHdig is a community research tool. In compiling the corpus, the TLHdig team has drawn on digital and analog resources developed by several generations of Hittitologists, including digital text edition projects on the Hittitology Portal Mainz and the contributions of many individual scholars.
As a collaborative tool, TLHdig features an online submission pipeline for scholars publishing new Hittite cuneiform texts. Users can copy and paste their transliterations into the creator interface and follow the prompts to finalize their submissions. For further guidance, users find support in an HPM manual for XML.
Through this dynamic approach, TLHdig will continue to expand alongside the field, ensuring it remains as up-to-date as possible. Furthermore, both the quantity and the quality of the data will increase continuously. It thus serves as both a foundation for text editions and a valuable resource for a wide range of research questions and methodologies, including the use of innovative AI approaches.
Funding and project management
The German Research Foundation funded the development of TLHdig. The project was led by Professor Gerfrid Müller (Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature / University of Würzburg), Professor Doris Prechel (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz), Professor Elisabeth Rieken (University of Marburg), and Professor Daniel Schwemer (University of Würzburg).