Citation
(2003), "Achieving digital immortality: cuneiform goes online", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 31 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2003.12231aab.021
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2003, MCB UP Limited
Achieving digital immortality: cuneiform goes online
Achieving digital immortality: cuneiform goes online
Miscellany could not resist publishing this announcement, perhaps because of my background in the British Museum's Department Of Egyptian Antiquities – the Egyptians of course used papyrus for their recording, which was much more sensible. Still for the ILL librarian confronted with an ILL request for a cuneiform table, here is the answer:
"The Babylonian king Gilgamesh – said to be one-third human and two-thirds god – ruled more than four thousand years ago in what is now Iraq. His heroic exploits and search of immortality are recounted in cuneiform tablets that date back to the second millennium BC." Sumerians believed that writing would assure immortality, and UCLA's Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative – a database of digital images, transliterations, and translations – seems to prove them right. CDLI is assembling a virtual repository of 120,000 cuneiform tablets from the third and fourth millennia BC." Cuneiform, invented by the Sumerians for the purpose of bookkeeping, uses shapes pressed into clay to represent grain, sheep, and cattle. Some tablets measure only an inch long, while others are huge and weigh several tons. Most are made of unfired clay and are highly fragile. Web visitors will be able to browse through the cuneiform collections of the British Museum, the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the Louvre, the State Museum in Berlin, as well as Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. CDLI has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation through the Digital Library Initiative. "We're looking back at people looking back", Director Robert Englund says. "They thought they were members of an historical community that reached back many thousands of years. And they believed that future civilizations should have access to what a person had to say in his time."
Source: Humanities, September-October 2002 (http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2002-09/gilgamesh.html)