The CAD project was initiated in the early 1920s, not long after James Henry Breasted founded the Oriental Institute in 1919, and barely one hundred years after the decipherment of the cuneiform script. This initial decipherment, and the soon-to-follow achievements in understanding the languages in which the hundreds of thousands of clay tablets were inscribed, opened an unsuspected treasure-house for the study and appreciation of one of the world's oldest civilizations. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was conceived to provide more than lexical information alone, more than a one-to-one equivalent between Akkadian and English words. By presenting each word in a meaningful context, usually with a full and idiomatic translation, it recreates the cultural milieu and thus in many ways assumes the function of an encyclopedia. Its source material ranges in time from the third millennium b.c. to the first century a.d., and in geographic area from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Zagros Mountains in the east. With sixteen of the projected twenty-one volumes published and the remaining volumes in various stages of preparation, with close to two million file cards - a database which is continually updated and which is accessible to scholars and students who wish to consult it - the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary has become an invaluable source for the study of the civilizations of the ancient Near East, their political and cultural history, their achievements in the sciences of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and linguistics, and not least the timeless beauty of their poetry. - Publisher.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.

The reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian medical, ritual and omen compendia and their complex history is still characterised by many difficulties, debates and gaps due to fragmentary or unpublished evidence. This book offers the first complete edition of the Assur Medical Catalogue, an 8th or 7th century BCE list of therapeutic texts, which forms a core witness for the serialisation of medical compendia in the 1st millennium BCE. The volume presents detailed analyses of this and several other related catalogues of omen series and rituals, constituting the corpora of divination and healing disciplines. The contributions discuss links between catalogues and textual sources, providing new insights into the development of compendia between serialization, standardization and diversity of local traditions. Though its a novel corpus-based approach, this volume revolutionizes the current understanding of Mesopotamian medical texts and the healing disciplines of "conjurer" and "physician". The research presented here allows one to identify core text corpora for these disciplines, as well as areas of exchange and borrowings between them.

This dictionary contains all the words attested in Assyrian texts from the Neo-Assyrian period. Most of the vocabulary comes from Neo-Assyrian and Standard Akkadian, with some Aramaic and Neo-Babylonian entries. The Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary was the first English-Akkadian dictionary ever published, and the new cuneiform edition features words written in the cuneiform script of the Neo-Assyrian period.