Procedure

Attestations

LAD is collecting attestations from the tens of thousands of new cuneiform texts that have not been processed in the previously published dictionaries (AHw and CAD). However, just like AHw and CAD, LAD is not a thesaurus: given a tight schedule and relatively limited resources, LAD’s task obviously cannot be to extract, analyze, and integrate all attestations of all words into LAD. Rather, a judicious selection of attestations is made to ensure an optimal cost-benefit ratio. Therefore, our lexicographical work focusses on:

• New words not listed in the printed dictionaries AHw or CAD. This comprises approximately 1,000–2,000 new entries. Many of these words are attested only rarely, but there are also quite a few better-attested words that have been missing from the dictionaries until now.
• New verbal stems not listed in AHw or CAD. As in AHw (and to a slightly lesser extent in CAD), verb entries are organized strictly by verbal stems. Several hundred new verbal stems are expected.
• New attestations for previously documented hapax legomena and other rare words that contribute to a more precise description of the semantics, form, or etymology of these words.
• New attestations for words that are already well attested, provided they document a new meaning or usage of these words.
• New attestations that document previously unknown morphological variants (e.g., masculine or feminine plural forms) or syntactic usages (e.g., the changing gender of many nouns) of the words.
• New attestations that expand the distribution of the words across the various periods, dialects, and text genres of Akkadian.

The references collected in the Supplement to the Akkadian Dictionaries project1 are fully included in LAD. All words, verbal stems, and attestations not included in AHw and CAD are marked with “new”. This also applies to new periods and dialects in which a word is attested.

For rare words, the attestations contained in AHw and CAD are also re-included in LAD. For words with frequent attestations, on the other hand, a selection of examples is made that demonstrates the word’s various meanings and usages, its formal variants, and its distribution across different periods, dialects, and text genres; the goal is not to simply repeat all the examples from the AHw and CAD dictionaries. Attestations taken from AHw and CAD are always reviewed for reading and interpretation, updated if necessary, and cited according to the latest edition. Since AHw and CAD are available online as part of LAD, additional attestations are easy to find.

Modularization

The work of collecting attestations from Akkadian sources is organized in modules according to text corpora. The estimated duration of each of the eight modules is calculated based on the estimated corpus size.

Literature review

An extensive body of secondary literature in Ancient Near Eastern studies and Semitic studies, relevant to lexicography, has not yet been processed in the printed Akkadian dictionaries. This constitutes another task of LAD. This secondary literature can be divided into four major groups:

• Studies on one of the numerous layers of loanwords in Akkadian.
• Studies on individual semantic fields. Studies on various realia are particularly noteworthy here.
• Studies on individual words, often in commentaries on text editions.
• Book reviews of individual volumes of CAD and AHw.