13. Authorship

Jonah Lynch – December 2021
Marco De Pietri – February 2024

Editors

The website was conceived and designed by Giorgio Buccellati, who also serves currently as main editor and coordinates the research done by the various contributors.

Jonah Lynch serves as Associate Editor. Besides contributing extensively to the substantive part of the website, he has maintained overall control of the operational aspects of the project and has helped in defining the format of the individual sections.

Marco De Pietri was the Assistant Editor, basically working on technical issues of the website.

IT specialists

Bernardo Forni wrote the program that produces the various outputs in browser format from input files in plain ASCII entries. Since 2016, he also manages the IT aspects of the website.

Collaborators

Several collaborators have worked and are currently working on individual entries for the website. Identification of authorship is of particular importance, and in the website this is done in two parallel ways.

(1) Each page or section of a page records the name of the author and the date. This applies also for short individual records as is the case of the notes. Where an entry is not so labeled, the main editor is responsible for it.

(2) In this section, the links in the left side bar refer to a page devoted to each individual contributor who has worked on this digital resource. In these author pages, a complete list is given of all entries they have authored, inluding single footnotes. These indices are produced by the DABI program.

Collaboration to the website is possible in the form of a a monitored forum. Details are given in the section on data handling.

The Research Group

Our work together began in March 2020, as most countries began to lock down due to the Covid pandemic. Physical distance made no specific difference to our work, as we were distributed across two continents and nine time zones. Each week, the team met via videoconference. Each member proposed integrations, questions, comments, and relevant books and articles for the bibliography. The central team included four scholars: Marco De Pietri, Stefania Ermidoro, Jonah Lynch, and Iman Nagy (Mark Chavalas later added some bibliographical entries). Our various areas of expertise include the History of the Ancient Near East, Egyptology, Archaeology, Comparative religion, Theology, Biblical studies.

Each week, we loaded a new chapter of the book’s 26 chapters on to the Google documents platform. The scholars wrote comments in the margin of the document, color coded in order to distinguish each author, and then we discussed the chapter in a live video conversation. After reading the entire book together in this way, we started anew from the beginning, in order to integrate our newly completed vision of the whole into the details of the early chapters.

The lack of notes and bibliography in the Italian edition of the book, noted in a review by A. Gadotti, was by design: with notes, it would have been a much more cumbersome volume, and above all it would have been a static resource instead of the dynamic, constantly updated version that a simultaneous print and web publication allows. As we proceed to write entries in our proprietary database format (See below. For more technical information, see DABI program), the website grows apace. Data files are processed dynamically: the site incorporates new information as soon as a data file is uploaded to the server. At this writing, the site includes more than 500 secondary sources and thousands of footnotes to Buccellati’s text.

Since the argument of the book When on High the Heavens… is densely articulate, we felt it was important to proceed with a consistent, steady pace through the text. Working through one or two short chapters per week made cross-referencing possible, and allowed us to constantly refer to the overall discourse, even though our work was more “atomistic” in nature. Our videoconferences focused on three fundamental actions. First, we sought to reach a sufficient comprehension of the text by Buccellati. Second, we discussed strengths of and potential criticisms to his argument, bringing to bear our varied scholarly formation. Finally, we proposed articles and books that could buttress or criticize Buccellati’s argument in some relevant way. During the following week, team members read and summarized the sources they had selected, as well as producing notes that link the sources to the text by Buccellati.

Sometimes our conversation led us to identify ideas or authors we needed to include in our bibliography; other times, we realized that we needed to seek alternative points of view to fill out a complete and intellectually honest vision of the topic under discussion. And sometimes, our collective intelligence wandered among the connections we could intuit between authors, archeological evidence, ancient texts, etymologies, and mythologies. It was a wonderful experience of a community of scholars.

Our aim was and is to produce a web publication that presents a clear argument (the one contained in When on High the Heavens…), and that is transparent about the existence and nature of debated points, in order to allow alternative readings of the same underlying data to be developed by other scholars. We are convinced that our reading is robust and honest, and we seek a wide-ranging conversation with other scholars, conscious that this conversation and the addition of new data is the pathway toward a more complete and rich understanding of Mesopotamian society.

It is somewhat difficult to describe the psychological stance that is necessary in this work, but it is an important aspect that deserves mention. Because we are aware that our conclusions are open to modification, we seek to publish the “atomistic” data that leads us to our (provisional) conclusions along with the thought process that synthesizes an inductive argument from the data to the conclusions. Along this path, a long time can pass in which there is no coherent story yet developed, only the collection of data. But this should not lead us to worry (see Critique of Archeological Reason 11.1). Rather, we can patiently collect data until a pattern emerges from the fragments, showing either the strength of our overall descriptions, or pointing toward a necessary modification of them.

The Digital Analysis of Bibliographical Information (DABI)

Following a procedure developed by Buccellati and his team in previous websites, in particular at critique-of-ar.net, we encoded bibliographical information about hundreds of books and articles that pertain to the overall theme of the website, in a format we call DABI, for Digital Analysis of Bibliographical Information. Each DABI file contains codes for author name, title, publication information, and a summary of the work in question. There are also codes for keywords and for notes, and the use of markdown to encode more complex formatting that cannot be directly supported in an ASCII text file.

Briefly, markdown entails the use of simple character codes to represent formatting. In the above example, asterisks enclose bolded text. For details on markdown, see markdownguide.org. The reasons for using a simple text file to encode our information has mostly to do with portability and durability issues. Computer systems rapidly change and are updated, and many programs and formats that were in wide use only a few years ago are now obsolete. A case in point is the dynamic website generation software that Buccellati had initially developed in BASIC, but which no longer runs on modern computers. We had to rewrite the underlying software in Python to create the current website. Since a study of history and archeology takes a long view, we prefer to use formats that are unlikely to ever go out of date, and in any case can be easily ported to new systems when that becomes necessary. Although this is perhaps not possible with ever-updated programming languages, it is possible for data files such as our DABI files. A typical example follows:

AU Mendenhall, George
Y 1975
T The Conflict Between Value Systems and Social Control
P in Goedicke and Roberts, Unity and Diversity
@@@R
SA jJL
SD March 2020
TO Monotheism; Polytheism; Covenant; Law

This insightful article distinguishes sharply between Biblical monotheism (particularly in its moral structure) and Mesopotamian polytheism (which Mendenhall likens to contemporary North American society, and liberalism in general).
The structures of control systems (political or social power) and values, while opposites, are not necessarily at war with each other. The clear message of the Bible is that social systems can continue to exist only where a minimally tolerable value system has already become operative (p. 171). Further, the mainstream of biblical faith is … the affirmation of a real factor in human life and experience that is independent of, not produced by, but ultimately essential to the existence and satisfactory operation of any social control system. (p. 171)
The second part of the article is an outline of what could be a monumental ten volume work if the author had the energy to complete it. He compares Covenant with Law along 10 different axes, and demonstrates the radical difference between the two. Covenant, in brief, creates ex nihilo a society oriented to the good; law presupposes a society and attempts to exclude the negative by enacting a war between society and the transgressor.
The competition between power structures is insoluble in their own terms alone. A sense of justice and right … must take precedence over selfish interest. The permanent symbol of the necessity as well as the reality of that Rule of God is the crucifixion of Jesus–the equally permanent affirmation that winning in the jungle of social manipulation and social competitiveness cannot be the controlling motivation of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and peace. (p. 178).

This file pertains to a 1975 article by George Mendenhall. The @@@R code means it is part of the religion website (the distinction is necessary because there are several other topical websites connected by the same underlying system). Our website contains more than 500 such files, which describe as many sources. One reason to create the DABI program was to dynamically update the website as new data files are added. Thus, the bibliography is modified and reformatted in proper order and page layout every time a new file is loaded into the system. Another reason to use the program is to create dynamic indices which list information in alphabetical, chronological, or keyword-based order, updated at upload of each new file.

As our collection of files grew, the indices grew apace. There are currently 2721 keywords listed, and the keywords are arbitrarily chosen by the author of the summary (as can be seen above in the line TO Monotheism; Polytheism; Covenant; Law, where TO stands for topics. It is common for different authors to use closely related, but different, words or phrases for similar entries in the index. Even the same author can forget which specific keyword they used weeks or months before. Therefore intransitive and intransitivity appear as distinct entries, as do Asherah and asherah. More sophistication in the programming could eliminate some of these duplicates, but at the level of detail that initially interested us, they were not too important.

They would become important, however, when we automated the creation of links between keywords, which a computer would recognize as identical only if they were indeed identical, down to the case of the characters. For more information on this issue, see the Multinodal Index.