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In these pages, the Department of the Middle East of the British Museum and the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), an international research project based at the University of California, Los Angeles, present a database of the inscribed objects in the London collection. In an initial phase of this collaboration funded by a grant from by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Jonathan Taylor and Marieka Arksey digitized the library and archives of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria. A series of excavations at the mound of Kuyunjik (ancient Nineveh) during the 19th and early 20th centuries discovered 30,000 tablets and fragments (a number reduced by joins and other corrections to a current total of 24,745 in CDLI files). These texts underpin cuneiform studies, and still form a core resource for our understanding of the social and intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia. Added to BM entries otherwise made by CDLI staff to its core catalogue in the course of our general capture, we now show a total of nearly 72,000 cuneiform artifacts in the Museum’s holdings, of a grand total that may approach 200,000. |
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