ARIADNE is thrilled to announce that the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) is joining us and will be providing over 400,000 resources to the Catalogue.
Administrative sealing excavated in Ur (mod. Tell Muqayyar), dated to the Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC) period and now kept in Penn Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA © Penn Museum
The CDLI is a rich online resource for scholars that provides access to more than 400,000 cuneiform inscriptions in the form of images and texts. These artefacts mainly range in dates from around 8,500 BCE to 640 CE and originate from the Ancient Middle East (including Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey), with some coming from further afield. Each artefact may have a translation and transliteration associated with it, as well as visuals which can be 2D and 3D images. The artefacts are mostly clay tablets but can take many forms, such as cylinder seals, slabs, and monumental reliefs. These artefacts make a major contribution to studies of Ancient Western Asia, including Mesopotamia and other cultures whose literature was based upon cuneiform, the earliest form of writing.
The CDLI originally developed out of the joint efforts of Peter Damerow and Robert Englund, who were working first on fourth-millennium sources at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. It was then formally established at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the scope naturally expanded to third millennium sources, then to the whole corpus of cuneiform artefacts. CDLI has, over the years, received millions in funding, especially to cover digitisation missions to document these precious artefacts in major museums like the British Museum, the Yale collection, the Penn Museum, and the Louvre.
The CDLI offers a crowdsourcing service so anyone, be they specialists, curators, or an interested general public, can contribute information and media about artifacts.
The CDLI provides several tools to assist scholars with their work, such as a comprehensive bibliography related to the publication of cuneiform artefacts, ancient calendars and year names lists, and more advanced tools for computational linguistic research.
The addition of these cuneiform collections to ARIADNE will extend the geographical coverage of the Catalogue, as well as provide a new sort of resource, i.e. cuneiform artefacts and their related scripts.