It's real!

Lots of things are real, but this one is special to me. I attended the University of Chicago back in the 1980s (remember those days?) as a Ph.D. student. One of the languages I took was Akkadian (some would say it took me...). And, the foremost tool that I had on my desk was the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. It wasn't complete at the time, so the other lexicon was the Akkadisches Handwörterbuch (how's your German?). Now, 22 years after I finished my classroom work and 90 years after its inception in 1921, the final volume—Chicago Assyrian Dictionary U/W—is shipping from the printer next week. Long journey, lots of people, lots of file cards. Pretty cool stuff!

I never worked for the CAD, but I did work for the related Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project, so I know a bit of what the CAD involved. But, the corpus of Hittite texts is miniscule compared to the corpus of Akkadian texts! Our file cabinets only took up one wall of an office; theirs took up almost an entire floor!

So, congratulations to the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Project and all its many employees over the years.

UPDATE: Chuck Jones, long-time archivist at the OI, has collected some interesting stuff here on the CAD.