CDLI News: Amarna and Middle Assyrian cuneiform tablets in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin

This link displays 825 recently completed archival images of 811 cuneiform tablets in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin. The text artifacts were raw-scanned by CDLI research associate Imad Samir, assisted by Chief Curator Achim Marzahn and his VAM staff, and were assembled to fatcrosses, cleaned and posted by us at UCLA. Dr. Samir’s work was materially facilitated by the technical and organizational support of our Berlin partners at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in particular by Jürgen Renn, Director, and Urs Schoepflin, Head of the Library.

Among these files are a good number of images of the famous Amarna tablets. In collaboration with Steve Tinney, we have, further, uploaded the full set of Amarna transliterations submitted by Shlomo Izre’el to the Oracc consortium, with some cleansing of the file done to achieve C-ATF consistency, and in Oracc; to C-ATF).

The larger group of new VAM additions to CDLI consists of images of some 630 Middle Assyrian texts from German-led excavations at Assur and Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta. This addition to our files results in substantial image, though still poor transliteration coverage of the museum’s 1925 Middle Assyrian text artifacts catalogued in CDLI (the total number of mA texts housed in the VAM is unknown to us). Comments, corrections and additions to these online files are of course welcome and should be directed to <cdli@ucla.edu>.

This addition to CDLI files marks the completion of our Mellon Foundation-supported capture of that major European collection.