In these pages, the Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) and the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) present a database of more than 2900 inscribed artifacts from the PTS cuneiform collection. This collection was acquired for the most part between 1907 and 1915, with the bulk of it coming in 1915 through the efforts of Professor O.T. Allis, who purchased them from Professor A.T. Clay at Yale University, with the help of individual members of the Seminary’s Board of Trustees and a special appropriation made by the Board. Many of the tablets from the Ur III period come from Drehem, Jokha and Tello, and consist for the most part of records of the 21st century BC Mesopotamian bureaucracy. The Old Babylonian group are mainly administrative documents and the Neo-Babylonian group consists primarily of legal and economic tablets. There are also some letters and a particularly significant lexical tablet in Akkadian and Sumerian.

The cuneiform texts have been partially edited by Marcel Sigrist, Albrecht Goetze, and a few others. Some 1,800 of the Old Babylonian and Neo-Babylonian tablets remain unpublished. The digital capture of the artifacts was done by CDLI staff members Michael Heinle and Jared Wolfe. Generous funding for this project came from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. Inquiries regarding access to this collection may be addressed to Kenneth Henke, Curator of Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.