Cuneiform Digital Library Online

One of the beautiful things about the Internet is the availibility of rare material online. Here's a story about bringing some of the most ancient literary treasures -- the vast collection of cuneiform tablets -- online for everyone to access:

Cuneiform Goes Digital: UCLA Professor Illuminates Life in Ancient Iraq
By Ascribe, 5/6/2004 11:17
RESEARCH TRIANGLE, N.C., May 6 (AScribe Newswire) -- It's not exactly Google, but the stunning cache of information Professor Robert Englund and his colleagues are making accessible on the Web is revolutionary - nearly one million lines of transcribed cuneiform, the earliest form of writing, with much more to come - documenting the social and literary worlds of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia, ancient lands comprising modern Iraq and parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey. While the wedge-like cuneiform script was often incised on stone slabs that could weigh several tons, it was usually impressed onto more portable clay tablets that hardened quickly in the hot and dry climate of the region.

While roughly five million of these tablets are believed to be still buried in the ruin mounds of Iraq, awaiting archaeological discovery, some 500,000 are safely held in museum collections in London, Berlin, Istanbul, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere

Among the treasures are the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Enumma Elish (sorry... no Planet X or grey aliens in there), and the Code of Hammurabi.

The digital library can be found here:
www.cdli.ucla.edu...

Byrd!
This is like amazing stuff.
How you find the stuff you do, I would certainly like to have some inside 'know how'.... Definitely would help me on my own personal researches, but getting back to what you have posted.....simply awesome.

The creation-myth Enumma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh are authentics? Gotta be....simply amazing, I tell ya....will check this link out...thank you again for such a find!




seekerof

Oh yes, Enumma Elish and Gilgamesh are very authentic and have been translated for the past several hundred years. I've got some older books (dating 1960's or so) with them in there.

In truth, I'm selecting some of this stuff from archaeology and anthropology new sites... who are picking them up from news feeds. (g) I wish it was more original.

I'm thinking of doing a blog (or a field report, at any rate) of the trip I take next month to work for one week on a public dig as a member of the surveying crew. I think that showing people how we do science/anthropology/archaeology is interesting. Too many of the documentaries I see are of the "whoa! We found something neat! Kerpoof! Here's what it is" rather than the very interesting "wow! Look at this! What is it? How do we figure that out? How can we tell how old it is?" type.