Project outline

The Leipzig Akkadian Dictionary (LAD) is a free online reference dictionary for the entirety of the Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian) language (see The Akkadian Language). It is a project of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig. As part of the Academies’ Programme, the project is funded by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Free State of Saxony and coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities.

The project duration is 17 years, from 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2041.

LAD aims to update the existing Akkadian dictionaries (see CAD and AHw) by systematically including textual sources and philological research that have become available since their publication. Unlike a glossary or thesaurus, LAD does not offer complete registers of individual attestations, nor does it annotate digital text editions. Rather, attestations are carefully selected in order to describe the Akkadian lexicon as comprehensively as possible (see Procedure, Attestations). In keeping with Assyriological lexicographical tradition, LAD goes beyond a purely linguistic reference work: not only meanings and grammatical features of individual words are explained, but also the cultural and historical contexts in which they appear.

An initial lemma list with English translations was compiled from three sources, kindly provided to LAD by Enrique Jiménez (eBL), Walter Sommerfeld (DAL) and Manfred Krebernik. As the eBL dictionary is primarily based on the Concise Dictionary of Akkadian,1 many translations given in LAD originate there. They may undergo changes and adjustments as LAD’s work progresses and are the responsibility of its editors.

A Digital Dictionary

LAD is conceived as a digital dictionary from the start, not as a printed one made available online. Every entry is a TEI XML document following Lex-0, the TEI’s baseline format for lexicographic data. Grammar, periods, domains, roots and stems are not written as free text but refer to controlled vocabularies, so that entries can be searched, filtered and compared consistently. Each entry records its editorial status and its revision history.

LAD is linked with the other Akkadian dictionaries. AHw and CAD are displayed alongside the LAD entries (see CAD and AHw), and a concordance maps every LAD entry to the corresponding entries of AHw, CAD and the dictionary of the electronic Babylonian Library (eBL). The bibliography is shared with eBL (see Bibliography).

The data of LAD are published according to the FAIR principles: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

• Findable. Every entry has a persistent number (LAD followed by six digits) that does not change when the lemma is renamed. A retired number points to its successor, and the registry lists every number ever assigned.
• Accessible. An open API, documented in OpenAPI and usable without a key, returns every entry as JSON, TEI or HTML. The whole dictionary can be downloaded as an archive of TEI files, rebuilt on weekday nights.
• Interoperable. Entries follow TEI Lex-0; the controlled vocabularies are published as TEI and as JSON; the concordance links LAD to AHw, CAD and eBL.
• Reusable. Every file and every API response carries its licence, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, and its attribution; every dated build of the archive can be cited (see How to cite).