Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) is a project with several institutions that aims to make cuneiform available on-line.

Collection Principles

The joint project began at UCLA with participants from various museums and academic institutions, such as Cornell, The New York Public Library Berkeley, The Musees Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire in Brussels and the Institut Catholique de Paris. Each participant created a database of the cuneiforms in their collection. The tablets date from around 3350 BC until the end of the Christian era, according to UCLA. The CDLI initaitve has electronically cataloged almost 225,000 of the estimated 500,000 Cuneiforms artifacts reamining. This blog will specifically focus no the work done at Berkeley through the Phoebe M. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.

Object Characteristics

The Berkeley Database holds about 974 objects. The tablets are organized by period and by text genre. The periods include: Early Dynastic (2600-2350 BC), Old Akkadian (2350-2200 BC), Ur II Period (2100-2000 BC), Old Babylonian (2000-1600 BC), Middle Babylonian (1500-1000 BC), Neo Assyrian (1000-600 BC), Neo-Babylonian (1000-540 BC) and Persian (539-331 BC). Genres include: administrative texts, literary texts, legal texts, letters, lexical texts, prayers and royal texts. The thumbnail images have a lot of information associated with them on the site. A viewer who wants an in-depth look at the text can click on the object to open an enlarged image.

Metadata
Each image is initally accompanied by a good deal of metadata. The layout is a chart format with the image on the right and the information on the left. The information includes: unique identifiers, the Institution Sponsoring the particular collection, the period of the tablet, the date of origin, primary publications and the publication date. The site allows the viewer to generally click on the leftside of the chart, over the information. That brings up another window with the item record. You can chose to see the full catalog entry which has information about the physical charactersitcs of the object as well as information about the time period, potential uses, the content and identifiers. Physical characteristcs, for example, include: Object Type (brick), Material (clay), Object Remarks, Measurements (200x280x60 mm), Object Preservation, Surface Preservation, Condition Description.��

Intended Audience

The project's primary purpose seems to be directed towards research for historians, anthropologists and curators. ��CDLI provides other educational tools and resources, such as a CDLI Wiki.