The British Museum Cuneiform Collection at CDLI
In these pages, the Department of the Middle East of the British Museum and the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), an international research project based at the University of California, Los Angeles, present a database of the inscribed objects in the London collection. In an initial phase of this collaboration funded by a grant from by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Jonathan Taylor and Marieka Arksey are digitizing the library and archives of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria. A series of excavations at the mound of Kuyunjik (ancient Nineveh) during the 19th and early 20th centuries discovered thirty thousand inscriptions. These texts underpin cuneiform studies, and still form a core resource for our understanding of the social and intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia.
