An Adventure of Great Dimension: The Launching of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary

The early civilizations Babylonia and Assyria left a vast corpus of records preserved through the medium of cuneiform writing on clay tablets. Erica Reiner looks back on the last half-century and more of work on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary project at the Oriental Institute of Chicago, focusing particularly on the reformulation of the task that took place during her early years of participation in the 1950s and 1960s. This included intellectual clashes between eminent scholars such as Thorkild Jacobsen and Leo Oppenheim. Benno Landsberger, an unrivaled older magister of the field in the eyes of both Jacobsen and Oppenheim, in the end supported Oppenheim and helped to move the project forward. Oriental Institute director Robert McC. Adams "concurs warmly in the course that has finally made the CAD not only a reality of the kind Oppenheim envisioned but one of the great and enduring humanistic achievements of our time."