ENEA Contributions to Safeguarding Material and Immaterial Knowledge from Ancient Mesopotamia

Thanks to the "Duplicazione e Rinascita" (Duplication and Rebirth) Project,funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and aimed at supporting the Baghdad Museum, since the beginning of the year 2000 studies have begun in ENEA, with the purpose of protecting material goods and the great deal of knowledge of the ancient civilizations flourished in the ancient Mesopotamia,now Iraq. Although the studies, projects and activities carried out share the use of data processing in the broadest sense, they focus on three different lines of research, which have faced and are still facing the problem of preservation of ancient artifacts or – equally important – maintenance and dissemination of ancient knowledge from different standpoints. The three technologies at issue are, respectively: the Reverse Engineering and Rapid Prototyping; the integration of Language Technologies (Multilingual Text Mining) and GRID Technologies in the ENEA-GRID infrastructure, for the analysis of ancient texts in Assyriology; the use of ICT technologies for the collection, use and dissemination of cultural resources