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NBC 7843 (CCP 3.1.5.E [1])
© 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 7.2.u49 - Uncertain [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum The previously unpublished fragments BM 41481 and BM 41635 belong both to the British Museum’s 81-6-25 consignment of tablets, which is reported to stem mostly from Babylon. Read more about CCP 7.2.u49 - Uncertain [3]	CCP 7.2.u69 - Uncertain [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This small piece contains some lines of the right edge of a tablet. It preserves the remains of a commentary on an unknown text. Read more about CCP 7.2.u69 - Uncertain [4]	CCP 3.7.2.K - Alamdimmû K [5] [5] [5] [5] [5] [5] [5] [5] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum The present tablet contains a fragmentary commentary, classified in a badly damaged rubric as a ṣâtu 7a commentary. However, the section that should preserve the title of the text commented upon is broken. Read more about CCP 3.7.2.K - Alamdimmû K [5]	CCP 4.2.AA - Therapeutic (?) [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This previously unpublished fragment contains remains of a commentary on a text perhaps of medical or extispicy nature. Although the exact base text on which the commentary draws is unknown, parallels to the individual entries can be found. Read more about CCP 4.2.AA - Therapeutic (?) [6]
CCP 4.3.u3 - Materia medica [7] [7] [7] [7] [7] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This small fragment belongs to a commentary on materia medica, whose main concern seems to be to provide equivalents for plant and stone names. Read more about CCP 4.3.u3 - Materia medica [7]	CCP 7.2.u73 - Uncertain [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This small fragment preserves 9 lines from the upper or lower part of a tablet. It belongs to the AH.83-1-18 consignment, which contains tablets mostly from Sippar. Read more about CCP 7.2.u73 - Uncertain [8]	CCP 7.2.u74 - Uncertain (commentary or lexical list) [9] [9] [9] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This fragment, found in Nineveh, contains meager remains of a word list in tabular format. Read more about CCP 7.2.u74 - Uncertain (commentary or lexical list) [9]	CCP 7.2.u77 - Uncertain (astrological?) [10] [10] 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, Read more about CCP 7.2.u77 - Uncertain (astrological?) [10]