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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.u83 - Uncertain [3] [3] [3] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This is a fragment from the upper right corner of a two or three-column Kuyunjik tablet written in Babylonian script. The obverse contains meager remains of a commentary that explains with short phrases names of planets and stars.	CCP 7.2.u86 - Uncertain [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This small fragment, written in an elegant and neat script, belongs to the high numbers of the British Museum Rassam collection, which contain tablets excavated mostly in Babylon.	CCP 3.5.1.B - Ālu 1 B [5] [5] [5] [5] [5] [5] [5] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This small fragment was identified as a commentary on the first tablet of the divination series Šumma Ālu from a list of commentary fragments kindly made available by Christopher B. F. Walker.	CCP 7.2.u49 - Uncertain [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum The previously unpublished fragments BM 41481 and BM 41635 belong both to the British Museum’s 81-6-25 consignment of tablets, which is reported to stem mostly from Babylon.
CCP 7.2.u69 - Uncertain [7] [7] [7] [7] [7] [7] [7] 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.	CCP 3.7.2.K - Alamdimmû K [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] [8] 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.	CCP 4.2.AA - Therapeutic (?) [9] [9] [9] [9] [9] [9] [9] [9] [9] [9] 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.	CCP 4.3.u3 - Materia medica [10] [10] [10] [10] [10] 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.

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