© Yale Babylonian Collection
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).
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Recent additions to the corpus
CCP 4.2.G - Therapeutic (bulṭu bīt Dābibi 2) G This tablet preserves a commentary on an unidentified therapeutic text. |
CCP 4.2.I - Therapeutic (skin diseases) I This fragment contains a commentary on a medical text dealing with skin diseases and materia medica to treat them. |
CCP 3.8.1.D - Iqqur īpuš, série génerale D © Vorderasiatisches Museum
This small and badly broken tablet from Assur contains, on its obverse, a series of protases from the menological series Iqqur īpuš. Several explanations are appended to the protases in a second column. |
CCP 3.7.2.E - Alamdimmû E Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum
This fragment of a four-column tablet belongs to a commentary on physiognomic omens. Whereas the exact identity of its base text remains uncertain, many of its entries are paralleled in the physiognomic corpus. |
CCP 3.6.2.D - Izbu 5 D Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum
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CCP 3.6.3.D - Izbu 14 D © Royal Ontario Museum
The following tablet is a Late Babylonian commentary on the 14th tablet of the teratological divination series Šumma Izbu. |
CCP 3.8.1.C - Iqqur īpuš, section 87: 7 C © Yale Babylonian Collection
The small tablet NBC 6197 is remarkable in several ways. First, it contains a commentary on a single word from a single omen. |
CCP 7.1.8.A.a - Elamite Calendar A Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum
This small tablet found in Nineveh contains a unique commentary on the Elamite names of the months. It is uncertain whether the text is a text commentary or an independent etymological treatise. |
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