Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform inscriptions dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these artifacts currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now more than 320,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDLI. About CDLI. In its early phases of research, the project concentrated on the digital documentation of the least understood archives of ancient cuneiform, those of the final third of the 4th, and of the entire 3rd millennium BC that contained texts in Sumerian, in early Akkadian and in other, still undeciphered languages. For despite the 160 years since the decipherment of cuneiform, and the 110 years since Sumerian documents of the 3rd millennium BC from southern Babylonia were first published, such basic research tools as a reliable paleography charting the graphic development of archaic cuneiform, and a lexical and grammatical glossary of the approximately 120,000 texts inscribed during this period of early state formation, remain unavailable even to specialists, not to mention scholars from other disciplines to whom these earliest sources on social development represent an extraordinary hidden treasure. The CDLI, directed by Robert K. Englund of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Jürgen Renn of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, is pursuing the systematic digital documentation and electronic dissemination of the entire cuneiform text corpus bearing witness to 3500 years of human history. Collaboration partners include leading experts from the field of Assyriology, curators of European and American museums, and computer specialists in data management and electronic text annotation. The CDLI data se