ISL and its descendant eISL owe an immense debt to the pioneering editors of the various subcorpora on which the digital editions are based. For the balags, Mark Cohen's Canonical Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia; for the Ershahungas, Stefan Maul's `Herzberuhigungsklagen': die sumerisch-akkadischen Eršaḫunga-Gebete; for the Ershemas, Uri Gabbay's Pacifying the Hearts of the Gods: Sumerian Emesal Prayers of the First Millenium BC; and for the Shuilas, Daisuke Shibata's Šuʾila: Die sumerischen Handerhebungsgebete aus dem Repertoire des Klagesängers. See the abbreviations on the about page for further details.
Karl Oberhuber (1915-1992) initiated a project on Sumerian lexicography in the 1960s. As a result of this project 150.000 file cards were produced and Oberhuber published a volume on the SBH-texts (Sumerisches Lexikon zu 'George Reisner, Sumerisch-babylonische Hymnen nach Thontafeln griecher Zeit (Berlin 1896)', Innsbruck, 1990).
In 1993 Manfred Schretter created a first database for lexical purposes. In 2011 the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) funded a project initiated by Martin Lang "Glossary of the Sumerian Canonical Balag Songs" (P 23323-G19 Austrian Science Fund – FWF; 2011-2014). This project was followed by the "Glossary of the Sumerian Emesal Songs and Prayers" (P 27224-G19; Austrian Science Fund – FWF; 2015-2017).
Contributors to the project (in alphabetical order): Thomas Baldauf, Sebastian Fink, Angelika Kellner, Noah Kröll, Martin Lang, Lisa Rauchegger, Manfred Schretter, Clemens Steinberger, Melanie Waroschitz.
The ISL Project's FileMaker Pro (FMP) database was provided to Steve Tinney to be turned into an Oracc project in April 2021. Between April 2021 and October 2022, Tinney worked on and off on converting the legacy FMP database into Oracc ATF, lemmatizing it, and organizing it into its present Oracc form.
As far as possible, the ISL lemmatization from the FMP dataset was used in the lemmatization of the Oracc version of the corpus; Steve Tinney aligned the ISL lemmatization with Oracc lemmatization methods, augmented it where needed, applied it to the Oracc corpus and reviewed outputs.
Aleksi Sahala provided invaluable assistance clearing thousands of ATF errors from the initial legacy conversion, adding metadata for the Ershemas, and reviewing the Akkadian lemmatization.
The ISL FMP database contained a number of Old Babylonian manuscripts. Where those were integrated into the ISL scores they have been retained in the Oracc corpus; standalone Old Babylonian texts have been removed from eISL because the Old Babylonian material is being treated in a separate project, OBEL [http://oracc.org/obel].
The Emesal corpus is complex and merits further work including more granular presentation of materials by site, and the addition of data from joined fragments which are often visible on the photographs on CDLI and the British Museum's collections online database. We anticipate that much of this work will be carried out in the context of other projects that build on eISL, and in planning the release of this version of this part of the Emesal corpus we agreed that we would let eISL stand as the name of the project in recognition of the foundational role played by the ISL corpus-builders in the creation of the digital Emesal corpus.