Technical information on primary text documentation pages

CDLI functions primarily as a permanent repository of cuneiform inscriptions found on their various media of clay and stone tablets, bricks and so on. Access to our documentation on these texts is primarily through the search engine of the project. Search there for instance for the Priimary Publication "TRU 001" and you will be directed to this page. Individual text pages like this one consist of catalogue information, transliterations (and with progress translations), and physical documentation of the inscriptionis. Individual fields in the catalogue are for the most part self-explanatory; for more detailed information see provisionally the Ur III catalogue description here. Documentation of the physical form of cuneiform textual artifacts consists of images of the artifacts themselves, or, where these are not available to us, of images of black-and-white hand or CAD copies produced by specialists in the field of Assyriology. We attempt to produce standardized archival images of all available artifacts in the form of “fat crosses” with shots of all surfaces. In the case of a clay tablets, these consist of scans of obverse and reverse surfaces (those normally serving as surfaces for inscriptions that all also so coded in the text transliterations) as well as of all four edges.

Clicking on the thumbnail images leads to full images generally processed to a resolution of 300ppi in the case of originals scanned (at 600ppi) by CDLI staff or associates, or at a resolution of 150ppi in the case of scanned hand coppies. Thumbnails on basic text pages have been reduced to 75ppi and thus represent the tablet at original or near origial size on standard computer screens. Full images offer a 4x enlargement of the original tablet or a 2x enlargmeent of hand copies. Dependent on availability, one to several links above the thumbnails lead to detail digital images of (sections of) the original, to further line art documentation, in some instances with previous published hand copies, and, in the case of many administrative documents, to images of envelopes. We anticipate inserting documentation of eventual cylinder seal impressions on tablets and envelopes as this material becomes available to us.

Note that any images you might download from CDLI pages will as a rule be named according to the numerical tablet coding identifications used in the internal data sets of the CDLI. The publication or museum IDs of such numbers as “P134765” of the text TRU 001 referenced above can be found by pasting the number into the field “CDLI number” of our search engine