Citatio: Thesaurus Linguarum Hethaeorum digitalis, hethiter.net/: TLHdig – Beta Version 0.2 (2025-03-17)

Now Online at HPM: TLHdig 0.2

Major milestone reached in digital Cuneiform Studies by a team of researchers from Mainz, Marburg, and Würzburg

The discovery of cuneiform tablets from the Hittite capital, Boğazköy-Hattuša, and other Hittite sites represents one of the largest groups of texts from the ancient Near East. These tablets include thousands of sources in Hittite, an early-attested Indo-European language, as well as numerous fragments in other Anatolian languages, alongside Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hurrian texts.

In 2023, the Thesaurus Linguarum Hethaeorum Digitalis (TLHdig 0.1) was launched on the Hethitologie-Portal Mainz platform (HPM) as an innovative digital tool providing comprehensive access to transliterations of cuneiform texts from Hittite tablet collections. Ever since its initial launch, TLHdig has become one of the digital tools that Hittitologists use every day, with more than 100,000 accesses per month.

Now, TLHdig 0.2 has gone online, comprising more than 98% of all published sources—approximately 22,000 XML text documents, many of which consist of multiple rejoined fragments. Currently the corpus consists of almost 400,000 transliterated lines. TLHdig 1.0, expected in late 2025, will offer complete coverage of all published texts.

Researchers can browse and search texts in transliteration or cuneiform and apply various filters for more complex queries. TLHdig is embedded within the HPM infrastructure and is integrated with various digital catalogue tools, media databases, and text editions.

TLHdig is a community research tool. In compiling the corpus, the TLHdig team has drawn on digital and analogue resources developed by several generations of Hittitologists, including digital text edition projects on HPM and the contributions of many individual scholars (see the Contributors section on TLHdig).

As a collaborative tool, TLHdig features an online submission pipeline for scholars publishing new Hittite cuneiform texts. Users can copy and paste their transliterations into the creator interface and follow the prompts to finalise their submissions (Create Transliteration). For further guidance, refer to the Step-by-step Manual.

Through this dynamic approach, TLHdig will continue to expand alongside the field, ensuring it remains as up-to-date as possible. It thus serves as both a foundation for text editions and a valuable resource for a wide range of research questions and methodologies, including the use of innovative AI approaches.

The creation of TLHdig was made possible by a research grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and was led by researchers at the universities of Mainz, Marburg, and Würzburg as well as the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature.

Contact:

Email: tlhdig@uni-wuerzburg.de

Principal Inverstigators:

• Prof. Dr. Gerfrid Müller (Mainz Academy and Würzburg)
• Prof. Dr. Doris Prechel (Mainz)
• Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Rieken (Marburg)
• Prof. Dr. Daniel Schwemer (Würzburg)