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Chicago Hittite Dictionary
2001-2002 Annual Report
Theo van den Hout
The highlight of the past year was, of course, the publication of the first installment of our "new" letter
, over 200 pages long. It appeared on 7 May and is the first fascicle, as we call it, of what will be the largest letter treated so far. It is a great piece of teamwork, and we were still working on it in the earlier months of the past academic year. And by "team" we mean not just the Chicago Hittite Dictionary (CHD) team, including our outside consultants Gary Beckman, Craig Melchert, and Gernot Wilhelm, but the Publications Office as well, without whose unrelenting efforts and great professionalism the volume would never have looked as beautiful as it does.
Meanwhile, work on its sequel,/2, continued. Editors Harry Hoffner and Theo van den Hout regularly got together transforming first and second drafts into a definitive text. All resulting changes were as usual implemented by Senior Research Associate Richard Beal who also checks for editorial conformity. Our other Senior Research Associate Oguz Soysal continued writing many first drafts of words starting with ta-, which will be our next volume. Beal joined him in this during the time left from his editorial tasks. In this way we are constantly operating on two fronts: there is always the work on the next coming fascicle (/2) while the first drafts are way ahead in the next letter (T).
Hripsime Haroutunian, our part-time staff member, finished transliterating the new texts of KBo 31 (published out of numerical order), entered them into the dictionary project's computers, and started work on KBo 41. Van den Hout similarly contributed the texts from KBo 40. Haroutunian also oversaw the work of the students Dennis Campbell, Kathleen Mineck, and Carl Thunem. It was their job to parse and file these new texts added to our corpus. Carl spent most of the summer of 2001 amidst our file cabinets.
A new addition to our project is programmer Sandra Schloen, who under the direct guidance of Director Gene Gragg is doing the main work for the planned electronic companion to the traditional hard copy we produce: the eCHD. For the material of our previous P volume she has designed a markup scheme to represent a dictionary article, transforming existing articles in a word-processing document format to XML, and transforming the XML version of an article or citation to a presentation format appropriate for display in a web browser. Thanks to her the transformation of the P material from simple word-processing documents to a fully tagged version is well underway and likely to be finished this coming year.
At the end of the year we submitted an application to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in Washington for support during the year 2003/2004. By that time we hope to have the so-called Challenge Grant of the NEH, allowing us to become financially independent and secure for the rest of the existence of the CHD. That will be one of the main tasks for the year to come!
As usual we had several visitors this year from abroad. Alwin Kloekhorst, a Ph.D. student from Leiden, the Netherlands, braved the Chicago winter and stayed with us for two weeks in January, consulting the files for his work on Hittite etymology and learning more about the dating of Hittite texts. During the month of February Alice Mouton, a Ph.D. student from Paris, France, checked our files for her dissertation on dreams in the ancient Near East and especially in Hittite texts.
Finally, another visitor during the winter was the young Turkish film and documentary maker Tolga Örnek (see photograph) from Istanbul, well known for his documentary Mount Nemrud: The Throne of the Gods. Earlier projects he directed focused on Atatürk, the Topkap1 Palace, and the famous soccer club Fener Bahçe. He came to Chicago to talk about his plans for a new movie on the Hittites, their history and civilization. He showed Hoffner and van den Hout his script and all the impressive work he had done, and it was obvious that this was going to be an excellent opportunity to get the Hittites the greater visibility they so clearly deserve. The English-spoken ninety-minute film will be a mix of dramatic reenactments of major scenes from Hittite history and real documentary. The latter will contain footage not only from Anatolia but also from Egypt and Syria, places where the Hittites intensively interacted with their Near Eastern counterparts. All this will be interspersed with interviews with several scholars from around the world. For this Örnek invited Hoffner and van den Hout to Turkey where they were interviewed against the backdrop of some of the more famous Hittite monuments as shown on the photograph. The film is expected to be released this coming winter.
Revised: February 7, 2007
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