Cuneiform Tablets

Wedge-shaped clay inscriptions impressed with a reed stylus across ancient Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria from the late fourth millennium BCE (Uruk IV period, c. 3200 BCE) through the first century CE. Over half a million excavated tablets preserve the administrative accounts, royal inscriptions, lexical lists, astronomical diaries, incantations, and mythological poems through which the Anunnaki deities are known to modern scholarship.

Core Themes

• Originating as proto-cuneiform accounting records in the Eanna precinct of Uruk before evolving into a logo-syllabic script writing Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, and Elamite.
• Major literary archives recovered from Old Babylonian scribal schools (edubba) at Nippur, Ur, and Sippar, and the seventh-century BCE Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh.
• Scribal craft placed under the divine patronage of the Sumerian goddess Nisaba and the Babylonian god Nabu.

Primary Text & Editions

• Untranslated tablets (photographs, line art & ATF transliterations): Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI — 350,000+ cataloged tablets)
• Sumerian literary transliterations & English translations: Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL, University of Oxford)
• Akkadian literary transliterations & English translations: electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL, LMU Munich); Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc)
• Reference work: Walker, C. B. F. 1987. Cuneiform. London: British Museum Press; Radner, K., and E. Robson (eds.). 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture. Oxford University Press.

Related Concepts & Sources

Sumer (cradle of cuneiform script), Nisaba (patron goddess of scribes), Nabu (Babylonian god of writing), Enuma Elish (Babylonian creation epic), Atra-Hasis Epic (creation and flood narrative)