Using the Database File

The text catalog of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) contains information about nearly 54,000 cuneiform documents from the 4th and 3rd millennia B.C. The catalog includes publication, excavation, and collection information about the documents where available, as well as information about the physical object, its date and it textual content.

For the downloadable version of the full CDLI database, you will need the program FileMakerPro version 5.0 or higher (Macintosh or Windows). An ASCII export from the same database is available as a text file along with a list of field names. A button in the top right corner of the FileMaker catalogue will take you to the data entry layout. The on-line CDLI catalog may be searched and sorted by any field, but records may not be added, altered, or deleted.

This catalog is a work in progress, so you will find that many of the fields are empty or the information is incomplete. Many people are working to complete the records we have and to add new records to the catalog. In addition, we plan to make links to full transliterations and digital images of the cuneiform documents in the catalog available very soon. We also expect to make additional changes to the format of the catalog in response to recommendations from the people who use it.

The original chronological data of the Ur III period records in this data base were prepared by Marcel Sigrist and published by Sigrist and Tohru Ozaki (Gomi). Those data were partially corrected by Englund several years ago, but have been recently more carefully corrected for the Umma material by Nicolas Vanderroost of the Free University of Brussels. The many duplicate entries of the Sigrist/Gomi catalog have been for the most part eliminated. The file remains nonetheless preliminary, with gaps in coverage, but is now hopefully more or less complete.

More detailed information about the catalogue and particular fields can be found in the catalogue documentation on-line and by clicking on the information buttons in the FileMaker database.

Please send questions, corrections, suggestions or any problems with the database by e-mail to: cdli@ucla.edu.

Last modified: September 1, 2004