Project history

The KIŠIB project builds on a long-standing tradition of collaborative research on the seals and sealings of ancient West Asia. Before KIŠIB was launched, two predecessor projects laid important foundations: DigANES and ACAWAI-CS. Each of them developed methodological approaches, tested digital infrastructures, and created preliminary datasets that have become crucial stepping stones for the present corpus.

KIŠIB (2025–2040)

The KIŠIB – Digital Corpus of Ancient West Asian Seals and Sealings project is funded within the Academies Programme of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities and jointly hosted by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW). With a planned runtime of sixteen years (2025–2040), KIŠIB brings together two academic centers with long-standing traditions in seal studies: LMU Munich and Freie Universität Berlin. The project is directed by Prof. Dr. Adelheid Otto (LMU Munich) and Prof. Dr. Elisa Roßberger (Freie Universität Berlin), who combine decades of expertise in West Asian archaeology, seal studies, and digital cultural heritage.

With KIŠIB, the strands initiated in DigANES and ACAWAI-CS converge. The project integrates and expands their results into a long-term infrastructure that unites corpus building, semantic enrichment, and broad accessibility. Around 20,000 items already catalogued in the predecessor projects will be incorporated from the outset, while the KIŠIB team will enlarge the corpus to some 80,000–84,000 seals and seal impressions. KIŠIB is therefore both a continuation and a culmination: the decisive step from short-term pilots to a sustainable research environment. Beyond expanding the scale, it fosters connectivity between existing seal corpora and related digital initiatives, and it actively builds networks among researchers, excavators, and curatorial institutions worldwide.

ACAWAI-CS (2020-2023)

The Annotated Corpus of Ancient West Asian Imagery: Cylinder Seals (ACAWAI-CS) was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, eHeritage, FKZ 01UG2041X) and directed by Prof. Dr. Elisa Roßberger. Over its three-year duration (01.11.2020–31.10.2023), the project was based successively at LMU Munich (2020–2021), Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (2021–2022), and Freie Universität Berlin (from 10/2022). Each host institution provided valuable scholarly, administrative, and IT-related support.

ACAWAI-CS, directly building on the experiences and data collected during DigANES, focused on the annotation and networking of West Asian cylinder seals and sealings—objects spanning from the late 4th to the 1st millennium BCE. Their study had long been hampered by fragmented publication practices and the disciplinary separation of images and inscriptions. ACAWAI-CS addressed this gap by building a representative corpus, systematically annotated with controlled vocabularies, modeled according to CIDOC-CRM standards, and integrated into the Semantic Web through links to authority services.

The project was designed with an open structure that could later be extended to other West Asian monument groups such as reliefs, statues, or terracottas. In this way, ACAWAI-CS created not just a dataset, but also a methodological blueprint for combining pictorial, textual, and material evidence in a coherent digital framework. Together, DigANES and ACAWAI-CS produced around 20,000 thoroughly catalogued and annotated items, which today form the ready-to-use backbone of the KIŠIB corpus. Its results—concepts, vocabularies, data models, and technical pipelines—now contribute directly to KIŠIB, providing the infrastructure for large-scale interoperability and future machine-learning applications.

DigANES (2017-2019)

The project Concept for the Digitization and Labeling of Ancient Near Eastern Seals and Sealings (DigANES) was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, eHeritage, FKZ 01UG1656X) and was carried out at the Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology at LMU Munich. The project was headed by Prof. Dr. Adelheid Otto, Dr. Elisa Roßberger and Anna Kurmangaliev M.A. Officially completed in November 2017, data entry continued during 2018 and 2019 with a focus on Babylonian second millennium BCE seals and sealings.

DigANES aimed to create a comprehensive concept for cataloguing and annotating seals in a way that enabled semantic enrichment, Linked Open Data connectivity, and multilingual documentation. Alongside this conceptual framework, a working database was developed that combined visual documentation (photography and line drawings) with controlled vocabularies for pictorial elements. The project thus provided both the theoretical and technical groundwork for all subsequent initiatives. Its final report documents in detail how the database structure and LOD orientation were designed. Crucially, the data model and Linked Open Data concept from DigANES were directly taken up in ACAWAI-CS and now in KIŠIB.