Introduction

Cornell University has two collections of cuneiform tablets. These tablets were made of clay and inscribed with signs that modern scholars call cuneiform ("wedge or cone shaped" from Latin cuneus). They come from an area that is called Mesopotamia, which today roughly equals the territory of the nation of Iraq. These written documents date from the beginnings of writing, c. 3350 BCE until the end of the cuneiform tradition sometime at the end of the first millennium BCE.

The largest collection of cuneiform tablets at Cornell is owned by the Department of Near Eastern Studies (NES). To this date about 6500 tablets and other inscribed objects have been donated to the NES department through the generous efforts of Jonathan Rosen. The curator of this substantial collection is David I. Owen, the Bernard and Jane Schapiro Professor of Ancient Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at the Department of Near Eastern Studies. The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of the Cornell University Library owns a smaller collection of about 194 tablets.

Cornell University is proud to collaborate with the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative at UCLA, a project of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era.