Ancient Language Dictionaries

The Problem of a Lack of Translation Standards

A lot of academically accepted fake translations exist due to religious and nationalist biases combined with a lack of any sort of translation standard. Ancient linguistics today is analogous  archaeology when it had not standards and was called antiquarianism. The lack of standards has produced dictionaries in which ancient words often have multiple meanings. If  translators don't like their translation they can just pick a different set of words! But even this freedom has not stopped translators who want their texts to be in either Greek or Hebrew but who cannot translate them as such. No problem! They just fill their text with names which can soak up any pattern of letters. As a rule, the more names in a text the more likely it is a failed translation. Only a very few modern dictionaries starting from scratch reflect the modern Scholar's Standard of translation.

Alphabetic Akkadian Lexicon by David Olmsted (2022)

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:43907/
The latest edition of a work in progress done to the modern scholar's standard. All the linear texts around the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age until the rise of Greek and Latin are in Alphabetic Akkadian. These texts have been labeled as Phoenician, Archaic Hebrew, Etruscan, Punic, Archaic Greek, Aramaic.

Cuneiform Akkadian (Assyrian)  Lexicon

https://isac.uchicago.edu/research/publications/chicago-assyrian-dictionary
The 2010 completion of this long running project which began in the 1960's is a monumental achievement due to its breadth of coverage of the Assyrian texts. Despite this, it is still a pioneering effort because none of its source texts were translated up to the scholars standard nor is this lexicon up to the scholar's standard as many Akkadian words have multiple meanings.

Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

https://cdli.ucla.edu/


Cuneiform sign lists from different time periods plus a growing central storage site for much of the world's cuneiform texts. Noteworthy is the Old Akkadian list by I. J. Gelb and drawn by J. Læssøe (1950)
This is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Oxford, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

Cuneiform Sign List from Kateřina Šašková (2021)


http://home.zcu.cz/~ksaskova/CuneiformSignList.pdf
This is the best cuneiform sign list for Neo-Assyrian (1000 BCE era) in English.  It combines the information from the earlier standards (Labat, etc) and where these earlier sources do not agree she correctly breaks the sign down into its simpler component signs.
Yet this sign list is not so good for the older, more pictographic ancient cuneiform because the created type fonts for these signs do not match reality very well. Additionally the linkages between Neo-Assyrian and Ancient cuneiform is still fairly uncertain. Where the Neo-Assyrian meanings do not match pictographic meanings the pictographic meaning are preferred. This list was compiled by Kateřina Šašková of the city of Pilsen Czech Republic and first published in 2015 and updated ever since.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Katerina-Saskova-2

Cuneiform Sumerian Dictionary by John A. Halloran

http://www.sumerian.org/sumerlex.htm
Only the 3rd edition of this dictionary  is online. The more complete 4th edition only comes in book form which can be ordered from the website.

Cuneiform Sumerian Lexicon from University of Pennsylvania

http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/
Its a lexicon but like all old projects it has not been done to the scholar's standard so Sumerian words often have multiple meanings.

Greek Lexicon Collection Logeion by University of Chicago

https://logeion.uchicago.edu/


This site provides simultaneous lookup of entries in the many reference works that make up the Perseus Classical collection. 

Greek Lexicon The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae from University of California, Irvine.

http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/index.php
An alternative to Logeion but  not as good. Its real value is that it has Powell's Lexicon to Herodotus.

Hebrew Dictionary by Jeff Benner (2009)

http://www.anijudaism.com/uploads/8/1/0/5/8105580/ancient_hebrew_dictionary.pdf
An impressive work attempting to bring Hebrew linguistics into the modern age by making a dictionary satisfying the Scholar’s Standard with one English word or phrase for each Hebrew word.