We will celebrate the Oriental Institute's seventy-fifth anniversary next year beginning with a gala dinner dance, to benefit the Legacy Campaign, on October 7, 1994. The celebration will end in the spring of 1995 with a festive evening for faculty, staff, volunteers, and members. Anniversaries are always occasions for reflection on past achievements, evaluation of current activities, and planning for the future. The mission of the Oriental Institute, within its setting as part of the University of Chicago, is to engage in research on all aspects of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, participate in advanced teaching, and maintain the Oriental Institute Museum and associated educational outreach programs.
Scholarly publication is one way to measure the past success of our research efforts.
Since the Institute was founded by James Henry Breasted in 1919 more than three hundred books have been published under our imprint. These publications are widely acclaimed as fundamental contributions to scholarship in a variety of disciplines - archaeology, history, and philology, to mention only the broadest categories. Another way of viewing the research accomplishments of the Institute grows out of Breasted's early recognition that some academic research projects, well beyond the capacity of individual scholars, require long-term institutional commitment. The historical development of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary began with a long phase, lasting from 1921 until about 1953, devoted mainly to the production of dictionary cards that represented, with some exceptions, every occurrence of each word. By 1936 there were over one million cards in the dictionary file and perhaps another five hundred thousand entries, in a somewhat revised system, were added by 1953.