Lingual-PACT: Brief description

The Lingual‑PACT 2026 conference focuses on the analysis of texts and translations from the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean.


“Texts in Translation”

  • This session examines the impact of literary texts across different scribal cultures, especially with regard to the translation and transmission of texts.
  • Central topics include the analysis of theodicies in Sumerian and Akkadian texts, the linguistic means used to translate suffering, as well as the comparative study of suffering in Old Babylonian letters, Aramaic texts, and the biblical book of Job.
  • The discussion also covers the early translations of the book of Job, including the Septuagint and the Targumim, and the relationship between Job and Akkadian theodicies.


“Statistical syllabary comparison studies”

  • This section aims to capture orthographic dependencies between Old Babylonian and western Middle Babylonian centers by means of statistical comparisons of syllables.
  • It investigates whether syllable frequencies allow us to distinguish between Mesopotamian and Syrian texts and what role parallel texts play in interpreting similarities between syllabaries.
  • The discussion also includes morphosyntactic and orthographic variation and its impact on syllable statistics, as well as the potential of machine learning for cuneiform decipherment.


“Anatolia and the Levant in Contact”

  • This workshop invites contributions that develop a methodologically robust approach to inscriptions from the Syro‑Anatolian contact zone of the Early Iron Age.
  • Its main foci are technical documentation, reproducible epigraphic workflows, and systematic semantic modelling.
  • It also seeks to develop criteria for comparability between Semitic and Anatolian corpora and to evaluate the interpretability of semantic models.
  • Furthermore, the discussion aims to shed light on conceptual encounters in multilingual polities, in particular how political and legal language is negotiated across different scripts and languages.

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