News from the CDLI: Museum of Art and Archaeology (University of Missouri-Columbia) cuneiform collection

Museum of Art and Archaeology (University of Missouri-Columbia) cuneiform collection in CDLI 

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), in partnership with the Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri-Columbia (MAA-UMo), is pleased to announce the addition of new digital content to its web offerings. 

29 of  the 36 cuneiform artifacts in the MAA-UMo are on long-term loan from the Missouri School of Religion (formerly “Bible College of Missouri”), Jefferson City, Missouri, and of these, 14 were recently published in A. Goetze, Yale Oriental Series 15 (see the online listings, and CDLN 2010:004; the suspicion voiced there that the MSR texts were in fact at UMo-Columbia is therefore confirmed--they were transferred there 37 years ago). The remaining 15 inscriptions as well as seven further pieces in the MAA-UMo collection are, so far as we have been able to ascertain, unpublished, aside from some few references in popular press outlets. Last month, as part of a digitization mission through Missouri, Indiana and Michigan, UCLA graduate student Michael Heinle scanned the artifacts, and the results of the UMo effort have now been added to CDLI pages, viewable here. We welcome the inspection of these images by specialists, and are grateful for their corrections of our catalogue, or notices of their interest in publishing the unedited texts in the collection.

The imaging and image processing were made possible by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and are part of the on-going mission of CDLI to ensure the long-term digital preservation of ancient insc-riptions on cuneiform artifacts, and, in furtherance of cuneiform research, to provide free global access to all available text artifact data. 

For the CDLI and the MAA-UMo: 

Robert K. Englund, UCLA

Benton Kidd, Associate Curator of Ancient Art, MAA-UMo