Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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developed a cuneiform sign repertoire that merged the three most important sign lists <strong>in</strong> the world (all
unpublished), which was subsequently adopted by Unicode.
Other research <strong>in</strong>to assist<strong>in</strong>g the effective analysis of cuneiform texts has been conducted by the
Cuneiform Digital Palaeography (CDP) Project. 99 CDP is a jo<strong>in</strong>t research effort between an
<strong>in</strong>terdiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary team at the University of Birm<strong>in</strong>gham and the British Museum that “aims to establish
a detailed palaeography for the cuneiform script.” The website notes that while palaeography has long
been taken for granted <strong>in</strong> other discipl<strong>in</strong>es, it is <strong>in</strong> its <strong>in</strong>fancy for Assyriology. This project has
constructed an onl<strong>in</strong>e database that <strong>in</strong>cludes digital images of <strong>in</strong>dividual cuneiform signs taken directly
from the orig<strong>in</strong>al sources and has used only those sources that can be dated to the reign of particular
k<strong>in</strong>g and are “broadly provenanced.” The CDP database can be either browsed or searched, and items
that are found can be saved to a clipboard and personal notes can be added. Users can access the
database as guests or they can create a registered account.
In addition to research projects on preserv<strong>in</strong>g and digitiz<strong>in</strong>g cuneiform texts, there are a number of
significant cuneiform databases and corpora that are onl<strong>in</strong>e. 100 The Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts
(BDTNS) 101 has been developed by the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales of the Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Científicas <strong>in</strong> Madrid. They have created an open database (registration is
required to view the unpublished tablets) that manages over 88,000 adm<strong>in</strong>istrative cuneiform tablets
written <strong>in</strong> the Sumerian language (c. 74,000 published and 14,000 unpublished). The tablets are from
the Neo-Sumerian period (c. 2100–2000 BC) and come primarily from five southern cities of Ancient
Mesopotamia. A catalog for both the database and transliterations of the texts provides a variety of
search<strong>in</strong>g options, and full records for tablets <strong>in</strong>clude extensive descriptive <strong>in</strong>formation, orig<strong>in</strong>al
publication details, a draw<strong>in</strong>g of the tablet or digital image, and a l<strong>in</strong>k to the CDLI (as there are records
for many of the same tablets <strong>in</strong> both collection).
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETSCL), 102 a project of the University of Oxford,
provides access to nearly 400 literary compositions from the late third and early second century BC. 103
This corpus conta<strong>in</strong>s Sumerian texts that have been transliterated and also <strong>in</strong>cludes English prose
translations 104 and bibliographic <strong>in</strong>formation for each text. The ETSCL can be browsed or searched
and also <strong>in</strong>cludes an impressive of list of over 700 signs that provides sign names, an image of the
sign, and the ETSCL values for search<strong>in</strong>g the corpus. 105
Ebel<strong>in</strong>g (2007) has provided an overview of the development of this corpus and the technical
challenges there<strong>in</strong>. Four features make the ETSCL different from other cuneiform projects: (1) it is a
corpus of literary Sumerian texts rather than adm<strong>in</strong>istrative Sumerian texts such as those found <strong>in</strong> the
CDLI and the BDTNS; (2) it is a corpus of composition, where many “of the <strong>in</strong>dividual documents <strong>in</strong>
the corpus are put together from several copies, often damaged or fragmented, of the same text”; (3) it
99 http://www.cdp.bham.ac.uk/
100 In addition to the larger projects and databases discussed <strong>in</strong> this subsection, there are many smaller onl<strong>in</strong>e exhibitions, such as “Cuneiform Tablets:
From the Reign of Gudea of Lagash to Shalmanassar III” from the Library of Congress, http://<strong>in</strong>ternational.loc.gov/<strong>in</strong>tldl/cuneihtml/, and the N<strong>in</strong>eveh
Tablet Collection from the British Museum, http://f<strong>in</strong>cke.uni-hd.de/n<strong>in</strong>eveh/
101 http://bdts.filol.csic.es/
102 http://etcsl.or<strong>in</strong>st.ox.ac.uk/
103 While the ETSCL focuses on a specific time period, a related project that it appears has just begun is the “Diachronic Corpus of Sumerian Literature”
(DCSL) (http://dcsl.or<strong>in</strong>st.ox.ac.uk/), which seeks to create a “web-based corpus of Sumerian Literature spann<strong>in</strong>g the entire history of Mesopotamian
civilization over a range of 2500 years.”
104 English translations of cuneiform texts are fairly uncommon, but another onl<strong>in</strong>e collection is eTACT, “Electronic Translations of Akkadian Cuneiform
Texts” (http://www.etana.org/etact/). This collection (part of ETANA) provides access to translations of 28 Akkadian texts, along with full bibliographic
<strong>in</strong>formation regard<strong>in</strong>g the orig<strong>in</strong>al cuneiform text.
105 http://etcsl.or<strong>in</strong>st.ox.ac.uk/edition2/signlist.php