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 tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now more than 200,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDLI. learn more
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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 tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now more than 200,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDLI. learn more
The earliest true script in man's history emerged at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. in ancient Babylonia, the southern part of today's Iraq. The signs of this script were impressed with the aid of a stylus into the still soft surface of clay tablets. Such clay tablets hardened almost immediately in the dry and hot climate of that part of the world. As a result of this hardening, and because such lumps of clay could not be reused, these documents from early Babylonia survived in great numbers. The early script developed into the better-known "cuneiform," the hallmark of Babylonian history and culture; hence the name "proto-cuneiform" has been accepted by most scholars to designate the archaic script. Most of the tablets of this early phase were found during the excavations in the ancient city of Uruk in lower Babylonia, conducted by the German Archaeological Institute from 1913 up to the present day and interrupted only by the two world wars, and by regional conflicts (the current director of German excavations, M. van Ess, recently reported [personal communication] that Warka has not been a target of successful plunderings in Iraq during the 2003 occupation of that country, unlike the sites of ancient Umma, Adab, Isin and Nippur). During the seasons from 1928 until 1976, nearly 5000 such tablets and fragments were unearthed, forming the basic material for a long-term research project dedicated to the decipherment and edition of these texts.
Robert K. Englund
