July 2001 - Nr. 7
Berlin Museum Puts Cuneiform Texts Online
TWIG - Berlin’s vast collection of Mesopotamian tablets have entered the digital age. In a joint project with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the University of California in Los Angeles, images of more than 3,000 cuneiform texts from the Vorderasiatisches Museum have been posted on the Internet, researchers announced in Berlin Tuesday (June 26). The Berlin collection forms the foundation of the new Digital Library of Early Cuneiform Texts, an online resource that will eventually allow scholars to call up texts from museums around the world.
"These tablets tell us about the everyday life of a world that vanished millennia ago," said project director Robert Englund of UCLA in presenting the Internet archive. In its current form, the online resource should help scholars better understand the graphic symbols and bookkeeping methods used in the third millennium B.C. "We expect it to make a decisive impact on the further development of cuneiform research," said Joachim Marzahn, curator of the Berlin collection.
When completed, the archive is expected to include some 120,000 texts, including their translations when available. The tablets in the Berlin collection contain administrative records from the great city-states and empires of Mesopotamia, religious material, and a few examples of ancient Near Eastern literature, including fragments of the celebrated Gilgamesh epic in Sumerian and Akkadian.
Interested readers can view the Berlin collection at http://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de . They might want, though, to brush up on their ancient languages first - translations are planned but not yet available.
