CDLI News: Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) collection in CDLI

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (<http://www.huji.ac.il/>), in partnership with the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (<http://cdli.ucla.edu/>), is pleased to announce the addition of new digital content to CDLI's web offerings.

Though modest in numbers, the seventy-two cuneiform artifacts at Hebrew University represent a compelling cross-section of Babylonian history, ranging from a group of fifty-five accounts and two fragmentary royal inscriptions from the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC), three Early Old Babylonian royal inscriptions of the Uruk king Sin-kashid (ca. 1850 BC), and five Old Babylonian administrative tablets (ca. 1800-1600 BC), down to fragments of inscriptions of the neo-Assyrian kings Shalmaneser III (859-824 BC) and Sargon II (722-705 BC), as well as of the great neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II
(605-562 BC).

Following an initial agreement of cooperation reached between Bertrand Lafont (CNRS-Paris), CDLI's director of European and Middle Eastern digitization initiatives, and Nathan Wasserman of HUJI's Institute of
Archaeology, Luděk Vacín of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, was given access to the HUJI cuneiform artifacts as part of a digital capture mission to collections in Jerusalem (the collections of the Sainte-Anne and Saint-Étienne monasteries, the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum Museum and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, are currently in preparation for web release, thanks to the cooperation and friendly assistance of their respective curators); the results of the HUJI collaboration have now been added to CDLI pages and are viewable at <http://tinyurl.com/7w79e54> (one Ur III text included there, Atiqot 4, pl. 8 42, has not been accounted for). Of the sixty-five entries recorded as unedited, eight have been assigned for specialist publication (<http://tinyurl.com/7mnobsr>).

Any queries concerning the status of the remainder, or of course any corrections of our catalogue data, should be directed to Nathan Wasserman <wasserman.nathan@gmail.com> or Wayne Horowitz <whorowitz@mscc.huji.ac.il> at HUJI, or to CDLI <cdli@ucla.edu>, respectively.

The imaging in Jerusalem and post-capture processing at UCLA were made possible by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; they are part of the on-going mission of CDLI to ensure the long-term digital preservation of ancient inscriptions on cuneiform tablets, and, in furtherance of humanities research, to provide free global access to all available text artifact data.


For the CDLI and the HUJI:
Luděk Vacín, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
<lvacin@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de>
Nathan Wasserman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
<mswasser@mscc.huji.ac.il>