The State Hermitage Museum: Exhibitions

The Cuneiform Digital Library
The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) is an attempt to create a virtual library of the cuneiform tablets that are preserved in various museums throughout the world. The project was founded by the University of California, Los Angeles and the Max-Planck Insitute for the History of Science in Berlin. These two organizations head the project, which unites the efforts of Assyriologists, historians of the ancient past, experts in the history of science, and museum curators from various countries, to create a systematized database available for scientific research via the Internet. The database will include digital images and interpretations of the earliest written documents in human history.

The project envisions various goals. At the present time, it includes cuneiform texts of the fourth and third millennia b.c., i.e. primarily economic and legal documents composed in the Sumerian language. The total number of these documents in the world exceeds 100,000. The tablets originated in administrative archives, excavated on the territory where there were Sumerian cities in ancient times, i.e. in what is now the south of present-day Iraq. Beginning in the 1880s, professional archeological expeditions were carried out there. The French excavated the site of Tello (ancient Girsu); the Germans, the sites of Warka (ancient Uruk) and Fara (ancient Shuruppak); the English, Tell Muqayir (ancient Ur); the Anglo-American excavations were carried out on the site of Jemdet Nasr (ancient name unknown); and the Americans excavated the site of Abu Salabih (ancient name also unknown). Between the archeological seasons, local residents by the thousands carried away tablets from the excavation sites and sold them to antiquity dealers. They, in their turn, transported the tablets to Europe, where they awaited their buyers on the shelves of antique stores. Thus, at the end of the 19th–beginning of the 20th century, the Mesopotamian cuneiform texts spread throughout the world and ended up in various museums and private collections of Europe and America. Often, documents that originated in the same ancient archive are scattered around the globe today. One of the most important tasks of the CDLI is the reunification of the ancient archives in virtual form. For example, around 1,600 texts from the archive of the city-state of Lagash of the Early Dynastic period (the middle of the third millennium b.c.) are preserved in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, in the museum of Yale University, in the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and in many other collections. The study of economic documents separately, removed from an administrative context, is often fruitless. Only an understanding of what the archive was as a whole allows the correct interpretation of the content of each text.

Another important goal of the CDLI is to provide the ability to carry out searches within a single database of administrative terms, personal names, toponyms, and date formulas, found in the texts. Usually, such information as how frequently a word is used in a certain text corpus can be looked up in a dictionary. There has not yet been developed a dictionary of the Sumerian language. For this reason, reading Sumerian texts, including economic documents, utilizing conventional methods involves a scrupulous search for similar contexts for each word, along with endless browsing through dozens of publications of cuneiform documents, as well as the need for looking at tablets that are often preserved in collections of other museums and are not easy to gain access to. The creation of a digital library of cuneiform tablets will make it possible to find the necessary parallels within a few moments, as well as to study the Sumerian language and the socio-economic and political history of Mesopotamia of the fourth–third millennium b.c. utilizing the materials of all the extant examples of cuneiform writing.

Digital images cannot fully substitute the cuneiform tablets themselves. The digital library, nevertheless, can protect the ancient texts from the misfortunes of modern history. Electronic documentation allows for fast and accurate identification of any given tablet. For example, the consequences of the recent tragic vandalism of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad would have been less fatal had the collection of this museum been included in the digital storage of cultural monuments.

The Hermitage, along with the Vorderasiatisches Museum, was one of the first participants in the CDLI. The collection of the Hermitage possesses around 2,000 cuneiform texts from the fourth–third millennium b.c. Most of these are administrative and legal documents (totaling at 1,945) from various archives; there are, however, a certain number of royal inscriptions. Most of the documents (1,576) are texts of the epoch of the third dynasty of Ur (21st century b.c.). The remaining documents include two proto-cuneiform (archaic) tablets (the end of the fourth–beginning of the third millennium b.c.), 343 texts of the Early Dynastic Lagash (the middle of the third millennium b.c.), 21 documents of the epoch of the Akkadian dynasty (23rd century b.c.) from various cities, and three tablets from the epoch of the second dynasty of Lagash (22nd century b.c.). Most of the cuneiform texts from the Hermitage collection have been published. For more information about the texts of each of these groups, point your Internet browser to
http://cdli.ucla.edu/digitlib.html

The CDLI includes a full catalog of the cuneiform texts from the fourth–third millennium b.c., digital images of the tablets, as well as, in many cases, scanned autographs and transliterated texts. It enables one to search within the database, as well as providing other electronic tools necessary for creating glossaries and various reference materials concerning this text corpus. The creation of popular educational programs on ancient Mesopotamia and the history of writing is also planned.

In 2000, as a result of the participation of the Hermitage, and primarily the collaboration with the German center of the project located in the Max Planck Insitute for the History of Science in Berlin, all cuneiform tablets from the fourth–third millennium b.c. from the collection of the Hermitage were scanned and their pictures were taken using a digital still camera. Currently, a full catalog of the collection has been completed, and work is being carried out on composing transliterations of the documents and glossaries for them.