News from CDLI: The educational pages of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

From Jacob Dahl

We are pleased to announce that the educational pages of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, the cdli:wiki, now hosted at the University of Oxford, have been significantly updated over the last few months.

cdli:wiki remains the host for a great number of tools for Assyriology developed and written by staff of the cdli at UCLA, Oxford, and the MPIWG Berlin. In particular the Abbreviations for Assyriology page that has been widely cited in recent years, remains accessible with us, and we are happy to enter new recommendations or make corrections in our files. We have added two other bibliographical tools, "RecentPublications in Assyriology" with abstracts and links to published TOC's, and a "Bibliography of Sumerian Literature, derived from the Oxford project "Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature".

When the CDLI inherited the Mesopotamian Year-Names project of Peter Damerow and Marcel Sigrist, that in the meantime has been expanded, and for many Lagash II and Ur III year names corrected by Richard Firth, we decided to incorporate this work into a broader presentation of the chronology of Mesopotamia. The list of Assyrian limmu officials now reaches from 1972 BC to shortly before year 1000 BC (the electronic Old Assyrian limmu list was provided by Gojko Barjamovich and Thomas Hertel). We are in the process of linking this list to the data of the CDLI project, and expect to add neo-Assyrian limmu names in the near future. Among the lists of year names, the Ur III Dynasty remains the best covered in cdli:wiki.

Our writing systems pages, under development as well, will host sign lists and information about the different writing systems attested in the ancient Near East.

Finally, our list of the "One Hundred Most Important Cuneiform Objects", that attempts to draw the attention of students and informal learners to particularly significant texts, has already received some publicity on this list. As always, we encourage comments, additions, and corrections to this webpage as well as to any of the other components that make up our educational and research tools initiative.