Despite the importance of the Syriac and Arabic manuscripts, reliable text editions have been lacking until today. The project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), now closes this gap with a new edition and motiv-historical study of the Syriac and Arabic manuscripts of the Ahiqar tradition as a historical-critical online edition. The SUB Göttingen developed a new text viewer to present the data.

“We have finally succeeded in producing a textual and literary analysis of the Syriac and Arabic versions of the Ahiqar tradition in digital form,” says Simon Birol, editor of the Syriac texts . “This has provided us with the material and technical basis for further research into the versions in the various other languages.” The oldest source is an Aramaic papyrus from the 5th century B.C.-beyond that, there are many other versions of Ahiqar's story, not only in Aramaic, Arabic and Syriac, but also in many other ancient and modern languages.

As project partner, the Digital Library/ Software and Service Development Department of SUB Göttingen was responsible for the technical development and implementation of the online edition. For the project, the SUB team implemented a generic TextAPI to provide the data and the text viewer TIDO for display. “All components are reusable as open source and are particularly sustainable. They can be easily adapted for future projects as needed and integrated in different contexts and technical settings,” explains Kristine Schima-Voigt, technical coordinator of the project.

Picture: Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France