News from the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon

The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project is back on-line.

We apologize for the unavailability of our system during the six weeks between early May and mid-June, 2011. The CAL server was struck by a hacker from an ISP in London, UK precisely on the day that Dr. Kaufman left the country, apparently simply because he or she wanted a complete copy of our online version of Sokoloff'sDJPA and wanted to save the $100 for the second edition and received instead an early draft of the first edition, while totally compromising the system. There is no indication that the identity of any of our users was looked for or their own privacy comprised in any way. The length of the delay is a direct function of the fact that we have failed to have any NEH funding renewed for many years now and the CAL continues on solely as a labor of love without any paid researchers.

Via: AWOL - The Ancient World Online (Charles Ellwood Jones) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Babylonian magic bowls : new database

The University of Southhampton's Virtual Magic Bowl Archive (VMBA) is launching a new database to record Jewish and non-Jewish personal names found in Babylonian incantation bowls from the 5th to 8th centuries CE, compiled as part of a British-Israeli research project (BIRAX).

Go to the VMBA website to find out about the new project and how to contribute.

You can also look at the results of a previous project - Aramaic Magical Texts from Late Antiquiry (AMTLA)