CDLI News: New Semitic Museum images of cuneiform text artifacts

New Semitic Museum images of cuneiform text artifacts

CDLI has uploaded a final batch of fatcrosses (altogether 1174 files of 1155 CDLI entries) of Semitic Museum cuneiform artifacts that had not been completed during the period of Mellon Foundation support (closed in June of last year) when we were able to scan the collection. All 7,000 raw files that went into the production line for archival images were created, with his usual regard for quality, by then UCLA graduate student Michael Heinle, assisted by SM's always collegial Deputy Director and Curator Joe Greene, and Assistant Curator Adam Aja. For another week or two, these new images will be searchable with the phrase “new image” in the field "Collection number" at <http://cdli.ucla.edu/search/>.

<http://tinyurl.com/kkba5aj> is the full set, sorted by publication <http://tinyurl.com/mtodhqs> are 703 entries recorded to document Nuzi artifacts <http://tinyurl.com/l27yyzd> are 292 Ur III texts, of which  <http://tinyurl.com/ml44owk> 213 are recorded as unpublished and  <http://tinyurl.com/n2gvect> 135 are messenger texts (53 published by Noemi Borrelli in Nisaba 27, who kindly provided her transliterations for CDLI ingest)

We note that 1664 Ur III texts of the Harvard collection are recorded in our files as unpublished; a large number of these texts were preliminarily assigned dates based on Richard J. Saley & Adam Aja's internal electronic SM catalogue that was limited to ruler years. Only texts associated with our “new images” have been corrected to display full CDLI-standardized dates of ruler.year.month.day. In this as in the other tasks that remain in completing CDLI’s online SM files, we seek the assistance of experts who have the time to identify the full dates of those that remain incomplete, keyed by the notiation "ruler.year.00.00 ?”, or who are able to identify publications of those texts we call unpublished. We would, further, be delighted to assist colleagues who seek or have the permission of the Semitic Museum and Curator of Cuneiform Collections Piotr Steinkeller to prepare formal publications of these and other unpublished text sets in the SM collection.

CDLI’s dedicated SM website is at <http://cdli.ucla.edu/collections/harvard/harvard.html>.