Overview

Mesopotamian commentaries represent the world’s oldest cohesive group of hermeneutic texts. Numbering nearly 900, the earliest date to the eighth century and the latest to ca. 100 BCE. The purpose of the Cuneiform Commentaries Project (CCP) is to make the corpus available both to the scholarly community and a more general audience by providing background information on the genre, a searchable catalog, and also photos, drawings, annotated editions, and translations of individual commentary tablets. For the first time the cuneiform commentaries, currently scattered over 21 museums around the globe, will be accessible on one platform. CCP has been funded by Yale University (2013-2016) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (Division of Research Programs “Scholarly Editions and Translations,” 2015-2018).

Goals & Methods

The first stage of the project entailed the creation of a searchable electronic database for the corpus and its publication online. The final version of the database includes 40 fields and allows searches based on many different criteria. Work on the catalog began in September 2013 and came to an end in August 2014. The bibliographical component of the catalog aims at being exhaustive, and in some cases up to thirty-five references are given (as in CCP 4.2.M.a). The catalog is now available in its entirety and continues to be updated on a regular basis.

The second goal of the project is to offer photographs of as many commentary tablets as possible, especially the unpublished tablets from the British Museum and those for which no photograph is available at the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) or at the British Museum’s online catalog. Currently, the photographic archive of the CCP consists of more than 5,000 photographs of almost 200 tablets, which represents some 20% of all commentary tablets known. The photos will constitute a key resource for all future study on Mesopotamian commentaries.

The third goal of the Cuneiform Commentaries Project is to produce a significant number of full editions of Babylonian and Assyrian commentaries. In this respect the project makes full use of the splendid set of tools created by Steve Tinney for the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc), and is fortunate enough to count on the generous help of Niek Veldhuis. Editions are being regularly uploaded to the project’s Oracc subproject, the Cuneiform Commentaries Project on Oracc (CCPo), from where they are embedded directly in the project’s website. The project’s website has been developed by Dr. Enrique Jiménez using the YaleSites/Drupal platform maintained by Yale ITS.