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ABOUT 120,000 cuneiform tablets from the third millennium B.C. are scattered throughout the world. Thousands more are plundered each year in Iraq and dumped on the world antiquities market. Tablets even show up on Web auction site eBay, where bidding can start at $1.
“They are just so incredibly dispersed,” said Robert Englund, a professor of Near Eastern languages and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, who spearheads the project. “It seems to us the only way to get control of the texts is to collect them on the Internet.”
Over the next year or two, Englund will try to finish gathering, cataloging and photographing 120,000 tablets, which will then be posted on the Web.
The tablets are the earliest known written documents and record how people lived, labored, ruled and wrote for millennia in ancient Mesopotamia. The library focuses on tablets created by scribes during writing’s first millennium, roughly 3300 B.C. to 2000 B.C. The writing looks like a series of little wedges connected by lines; the term cuneiform means “wedge-shaped.”
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| A cuneiform tablet sits on the desk of UCLA Professor Robert Englund, sitting in the background. The tablet is a labor text, possibly from the Babylonian city of Umma.
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About 60,000 texts are already online.
“It’s like being able to walk into the tablet room of a museum and pick up the actual tablets — but this can be done from any corner of the planet and by any number of individuals at one time,” said Gene Gragg, director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute.
Cuneiform collections in England, Germany, Norway, Russia and the United States are still available for students to see.
“It’s simply going to change the way we work because access to these texts is slow and painful and can involve traveling thousands of miles to see. That changing to just a click away is going to be huge,” said Steve Tinney of the University of Pennsylvania, which is compiling a Web-based dictionary of Sumerian, the first written language.
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The best-known cuneiform texts include the earliest known creation myths, legal codes, medical prescriptions and recipes for beer. Most, however, are more mundane and include ledgers, deeds, receipts and lists of everything from types of birds to musical instruments and the woods used to make them.
The detail they contain is unparalleled for any other period in history until perhaps the rise of the Venetian empire in the 1200s. Historians hope the library will prove a boon for economic historians and others who, until now, have ignored cuneiform records.
“We are hoping to bring the richness of Mesopotamian culture to anyone who works on anything. We have agriculture texts, magic texts and medical, legal and religious texts. This is a treasure trove that has not been exploited,” Tinney said.
 Visit the digital library
© 2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Science news from MSNBC
The race to save the oldest writings
Encarta Encyclopedia: Cuneiform
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
