A digital library of cuneiform texts

28 January 2016

Throughout the time that the Near East has been racked by war and bloodshed, its archaeological sites pillaged, ancient objects destroyed or illegally sold on the open market, for over 15 years an international group of Assyriologists has been building, with great patience and perseverance, a massive digital library of cuneiform texts.

The library is called the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), and is part of a project shared between the University of California (Los Angeles) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). The aim is to make accessible to all, via the Internet, texts in cuneiform script impressed into soft clay, or less often inscribed on stone, written by the peoples of the ancient Near East between 3400 BCE and 75 CE. It is estimated that the number of cuneiform texts that have been discovered ranges between 500,000 and 1,000,000. They are held in museums and collections all over the world. More than 300,000 have already been catalogued by the CDLI; the most complete records comprise digital photographs of the inscribed object (or a copy of it), a transliteration, and for many of the texts, an English translation (for a smaller number of them, translations into French or German are also available). Various functions make it possible to conduct research on the collection, based on historical period, text type, or even through the sequence of signs that form the transliterations. Several electronic scientific publications are associated with the site, such as the CDLI Journal and the CDLI Bulletin.

The CDLI project was launched in 1998 and received funding from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities in the early 2000s. However, since 2009, thanks to funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the collections have been placed online at an accelerated rate. In 2015, a new tool was added, namely the RTI viewer (Reflectance Transformation Imaging), which makes it possible to view and explore graphics files at high resolution directly on an html page, with the possibility of altering the direction of the light source, as in the case of this Neo-Sumerian administrative tablet. Cylinder seals can also viewed in their rolled out form. Also in 2015, a complete catalogue of the collection held by the Musée du Louvre was added, which is to say 12,520 entries, a third of which have not yet been published.

The CDLI is aimed primarily at Assyriologists, but also at a wider public who can ‘take a stroll’ through this virtual museum of cuneiform texts. An application developed for the iPad 2 makes it possible to familiarise oneself with Mesopotamian writing production, thanks to fact sheets that offer a concise presentation of the many inscribed items, or of other items classified by theme, or perhaps even of digitisation/scanning techniques. A personal computer can also be used to operate this application (showcase).

In conjunction with the CDLI, the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC) project offers a presentation of a targeted corpus of cuneiform texts based on historical period, archive or specific theme. In this way, one can find out about the correspondence received by the Assyrian kings, and read, for example, the letters despatched by astrologers in their attempts, through various subterfuges, to deflect bad omens from royal personages. The texts are presented in transliterated form as well as in English translation. One can also find lists of ancient vocabulary used by scribes who had to learn Sumerian, a language that died out in the second and first millennia BCE.

Also linked to the CDLI, a bilingual digital encyclopaedia called cdli:wiki is in the process of being created by a team of Franco-British researchers. In addition to thematic notes, the encyclopaedia includes entries on the various numerical and measuring systems adopted, on chronology and the calendars used, and a presentation of the one hundred objects inscribed in cuneiform that are of the greatest significance to today’s historians. The list commences with the Code of Hammurabi (eighteenth century BCE), kept at the Louvre in Paris.