National Museum of Iran in the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI)

In these pages, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), an international research project of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, the University of Oxford, and the Unversity of California, Los Angeles, presents a database of more than 1100 inscribed objects in the National Museum of Iran (NMI) collection. The cuneiform text artifacts in Tehran, where available also their published line art copies, are being digitized as a joint effort of the CDLI and the NMI, following the standard conventions of the CDLI. This digitization project was first proposed by Jacob Dahl of the University of Oxford, and Jebrael Nokande, Director of the National Museum of Iran, during a two-day Tehran workshop in May 2016 focusing on the electronic capture, storage and dissemination of cuneiform artifacts in the NMI. Project partners signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in 2017, and in January 2018 collaboration partners Parsa Daneshmand (University of Oxford), Simin Piran (Head of Tablet Department, NMI), along with the voluntary cooperation of Sepideh Yeganeh, commenced work with the processing of a set of Proto-Elamite tablets. A full catalog of the collection, including text transliterations and translations with word and sign glossaries, is currently under construction.

Text artifacts by period: 

   Late Uruk (ca. 3500-3350 BC) 
   Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC) 
   Old Akkadian (ca. 2350-2200 BC) 
   Linear Elamite (ca. 2200 BC) 
   Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC) 
   Old Babylonian (ca. 1900-1600 BC) 
   Middle Elamite (ca. 1300-1000 BC) 
   Neo-Assyrian (ca. 1000-600 BC) 
   Achaemenid (547-331 BC) 

Text artifacts by genre: 

   Administrative 
   Royal/Monumental 
   Literary 
   Lexical 
   Mathematical 
   School 


Search all CDLI inscriptions