The British Museum Cuneiform Collection at CDLI

The British Museum Cuneiform Collection at CDLI

In these pages, the Department of the Middle East of the British Museum and the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), an international research project based at the University of California, Los Angeles, present a database of the inscribed objects in the London collection. In an initial phase of this collaboration funded by a grant from by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Jonathan Taylor and Marieka Arksey are digitizing the library and archives of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria. A series of excavations at the mound of Kuyunjik (ancient Nineveh) during the 19th and early 20th centuries discovered thirty thousand inscriptions. These texts underpin cuneiform studies, and still form a core resource for our understanding of the social and intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia.

View the Kuyunjik Collection Download Geers copies of Kuyunjik tablets BM tablets by period:    Late Uruk (ca. 3400-3000 BC)    Early Dynastic I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)    Early Dynastic IIIa (ca. 2600 BC)    Early Dynastic IIIb (ca. 2500-2350 BC)    Old Akkadian (ca. 2350-2200 BC)    Lagash II (ca. 2200-2100 BC)    Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC)    Old Assyrian (ca. 2000-1900 BC)    Old Babylonian (ca. 2000-1600 BC)    Middle Babylonian (ca. 1500-1000 BC)    Middle Assyrian (ca. 1500-1000 BC)    Neo-Assyrian (ca. 1000-600 BC)    Neo-Babylonian (ca. 1000-540 BC)    Achaemenid (ca. 540-330 BC)    Hellenistic (ca. 330-140 BC)    Uncertain date BM tablets by provenience:    Alalakh    Amarna    Babylon    Borsippa    Diqdiqqah    Drehem    Eridu    Fara    Girsu    Jemdet Nasr    Kish    Kültepe    Larsa    Nineveh    Nimrud    Nippur    Nuzi    Sippar    Tell Brak    Ubaid    Umma    Ur    Uruk    unclear BM tablets by text genre:    Administrative texts    Literary texts    Omina    Prayers/Incantations    Lexical texts    Mathematical texts    School texts    Scientific texts    Letters    Royal/Monumental texts BM tablets by type:    bricks    cones    sealings    tags    stone inscriptions    metal inscriptions    other Search all CDLI inscriptions