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Ancient Near Eastern Studies: Online resources

The Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library is the premier research library for Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. It incorporates the libraries previously housed in the Griffith Institute and the Ashmolean Museum.
Subjects: Ancient Near East

Subject-specific online resources (selection)

The American Center of Oriental Research promotes research and publication across disciplines with a special emphasis on archaeology in the region, inc a Blog, online newsletter and photoarchive.

The purpose of this website is to disseminate knowledge and awareness of this ancient civilization.

This website offers information about the fifty most important Mesopotamian gods and goddesses and provides starting points for further research.

The Archaeological Gazetteer of Iran is a free-access, web-based encyclopedia of archaeological sites, places, and monuments in the Iranian World, covering sites ranging in date from the Lower Palaeolithic period to the fourteenth century. 

The BDTNS  is searchable electronic corpus of Neo-Sumerian administrative cuneiform tablets dated to the 21st century B.C.

Research, publications and news published by the Oriental Department of the German Archaeological Institute.

The DCCLT publishes editions and translations of cuneiform lexical texts from all periods of Mesopotamian history with glossaries. 

The core of this web project is represented by the possibility of visualizing the GIS map with shapefiles about the Early Bronze Age settlements within the ECP area, visualized through maps at different scales, aerial photos, DEM, and various sets of satellite imagery.

The aim of the Ebla Digital Archives database is to provide a digital edition of the entire corpus of cuneiform texts belonging to the Ebla Royal Archives.

eCUT is the first electronic corpus of the written sources from the kingdom of Urartu. It presents Urartian texts in transliterations with annotations of individual words (lemmatization), English translations, and glossaries of Urartian words, proper nouns, and logograms. The editions are based on Mirjo Salvini's Corpus dei testi urartei I–V.

Electronic Tools and Ancient Near East Archives is an electronic publishing project designed to enhance the study of the history and culture of the Ancient Near East.

Portal for Hittitology, listing bibliographies, projects, photo collections, eresources and news.

The Hittite Name Finder is a tool aiming to facilitate the retrieval of, and research on, names in Hittite texts, combining the general list of names with the lists of occurrences of divine and personal names.

The IDD is designed as a companion to the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (DDD), edited by Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking and Pieter van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 2nd edition 1999). Its focus will be on visual sources, which are essential for interpreting the religious symbol systems of antiquity.

The Archive here presented offers a unique glimpse into archaeology in Iraq in the 1980s through the hundreds of Kodachrome colour slides that Prof Matthews took in the field.

LaBaSi is an on-line cuneiform sign list that will elucidate the diachronic development of sign forms. It will allow the identification of standard forms as well as of scribal idiosyncrasies in the Late Babylonian period.

This website, which is in English and in Arabic, was initiated in mid-2011, shortly after the war broke out in Syria. The intention of the website's creator is to "keep alive the memory of Syria's extraordinarily diverse past" while the country is closed to visitors.

A useful list of online resources compiled by the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge (CU) for students and researchers of Assyriology and Mesopotamian Archaeology. N.B.: links to electronic resouces subscribed to by CU are only accessible to members of CU. However, members of the University of Oxford can access these resources via SOLO and the Databases A-Z

Information about its collection, events, publications (inc electronic), library, archive and excavations.

Database of the recorded inhabitants of Babylonia between c. 620 and 330 BCE. Its main focus is on individuals who lived in southern Mesopotamia under Persian rule (539-330 BCE), but it also includes the preceding period of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

Open Access article by Dominique Charpin in Bibliotheca Orientalis 71 (2014) listing electronic resources for Assyriology. 

SEAL aims to compile an exhaustive catalogue of Akkadian literary texts from the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE, to present this corpus in such a way as to enable the efficient study of the entire early Akkadian corpus in all its philological, literary, and historical dimensions.

Video clips about the excavations of the mission archéologique syro-française de Ras Shamra – Ougarit, highlighting architecture and tombs at Ugarit as well as finds from Ugarit such as the ivories.

This platform for Ugaritic studies infoms about the history of Ugarit, its texts and their transcriptions, and it provides a bibliography. 

UrOnline preserves digitally and invites in-depth exploration of the finds and records from the site of Ur.

The project aims to support and resource low-cost and easy-to-use 3D acquisition systems, advance automated virtual reconstruction algorithms, evolve a collaborative reconstruction environment and facilitate interactive on-line 3D archiving.

The corpus is intended as a research tool for the study of Sumerian writing and language, currently comprising 113,770 Sumerian texts in 161,405 transliterations, dating from the Fara period to the Early Old Babylonian period.

ZODIAC aims to develop a new account of the emergence, spread and cross-cultural transformations of zodiacal astral science in Babylonia, Egypt and the Graeco-Roman world. Includes a bibliography.

Museum collections online

Film and theatre

This  website collects recordings of Assyriologists reading Babylonian and Assyrian poetry and literature aloud in the original language, providing the public with some idea of how modern scholars think these languages were pronounced.

A 7-part filmed reading (by John Levitt and Fran Hazelton) of the Gilgamesh epic as told in Fran Hazelton's publication "Three Kings of Warka".

Cambridge Assyriology students led by Dr Martin Worthington have made the world's first film in Babylonian. Based on a 2,700-year-old poem, 'The Poor Man of Nippur' is a violent and comic story of revenge.

The voice of Tarām-Kūbi, an Assyrian woman who corresponded with her brother and her husband in Kaneš, takes us 4,000 years back in time.

Podcasts

Thin End of the Wedge explores life in the ancient Middle East. There are many wonderful stories we can tell about those people, their communities, the gritty reality of their lives, their hopes, fears and beliefs. We do that through the objects that survive and the cities where people once lived. I focus on the cultures that used cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) writing, so mostly on ancient Iraq and nearby regions from about 3000 BC to about 100 AD.