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 this website 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, as well as 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.

The Cuneiform Commentaries Project is funded by Yale University (2013-2016) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (Division of Research Programs “Scholarly Editions and Translations,” 2015-2018).

Recent additions to the corpus

CCP 7.2.u55 - Uncertain Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This small fragment preserves meager remains of a text written in tabular format. At least two columns and three sub-columns are preserved.	CCP 7.2.u57 - Medical recipe Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This tablet, classified as a “commentary” in the catalogue of the British Museum’s “Babylon Collection,” is not an actual commentary, but rather a medical recipe with occasional glosses.	CCP 7.2.u59 - Materia medica (?) Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This fragment, written in a neat and clear script but whose surface is badly eroded, contains remains of a commentary on a text of uncertain nature.	CCP 6.1.2.C - Aa I/5 (?) C Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This previously unidentified fragment belongs to a commentary on the lexical series Aa.
CCP 7.2.u51 - Uncertain Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This previously unpublished commentary is preserved in two small fragments that have been joined back to back, in a so-called “sandwich join.” Both fragments belong to the 81-6-25 consignment, reported to stem from the city of Babylon.	CCP 7.2.u56 - Uncertain Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum The present tablet, written in an elegant and neat script, constitutes a commentary on a text of uncertain nature. It is formed by two joining fragments (BM 47668+ BM 48447), both of which belong to the 81-11-3 consignment. They were joined by I.	CCP 7.2.u74 - Uncertain (commentary or lexical list) Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This fragment, found in Nineveh, contains meager remains of a word list in tabular format.	CCP 7.2.u77 - Uncertain (astrological?) Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum Little can be said of this tiny fragment. It was classified as a “commentary?” in Lambert’s catalog of the high numbers in the Kuyunjik collection,

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