Category: Western Asia
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NEWS IN THE CDLI COLLECTIONS CUNEIFORM ANYONE? CDLI depends on the assistance of collaborators of all stripes. Wish to submit files of new texts, or images, transliterations or corrections of entries in our database? Perhaps make a tax-deductible contribution to support our efforts? A DIGITAL LIBRARY FOR CUNEIFORM The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era.
Introduction Cornell University has a number of collections of cuneiform tablets, donated to the university over the past century. These tablets are made of clay and inscribed with signs that modern scholars call cuneiform ("wedge or cone shaped"). They come from an area that is called Mesopotamia, which today roughly equals the territory of modern Iraq. These written documents date from the beginnings of writing, ca. 3350 B.C.E. until the end of the cuneiform tradition, sometime towards the end of the second century C.E. The largest collection of cuneiform tablets at Cornell is housed in the Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Seminar in the Department of Near Eastern Studies (NES) and currently consists of ca.
