The Walters Art Museum and Creative Commons

From AWOL: The Walters Art Museum announced this week that it has removed copyright restrictions from more than 10,000 Images.  Those images are now licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Collections at the Walters relating to antiquity include: Art of the Ancient Americas Art of Ancient Egypt and Nubia Art of Ancient Greece […] Read More

Musée achéménide

An international collective of scholars led by Pierre Briant (Collège de France, Paris) have established an online “Achaemenid museum.” This elegant musée achéménide website utilizes Flash to provide access to a fine collection of artifacts and historical information regarding the classic Persian civilization known as the Achaemenid empire, the most famous leader of which was […] Read More

Archaeobotanical Database in Tübingen

Scholars at the University of Tübingen in Germany are “investigat[ing] the development of prehistoric wild plant floras of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. The geographic area … represented in the data, includes Greece, Turkey, Western Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Northern Egypt. The chronological frame comprises the Chalcolithic period, Bronze and […] Read More

Digitising Cultural Heritage at the BM

A study day at the British Museum Saturday 4 September, 09.55–16.30 Stevenson Lecture Theatre Free, booking advised As well as revolutionising modern work and social life, digital technology is also transforming cultural heritage management. The power to store, organise and distribute vast quantities of complex data makes it possible to do things that only 20 […] Read More

ICONEA’s ICOBASE

The International Conference of Near Eastern Archaeomusicology (ICONEA) maintains an online Database of Middle and Near Eastern Archaeomusicological Data, in short ICOBASE. “It is the receptacle of the iconography, the terracottae, extant instruments, cuneiform texts, and all materials relevant to the subject.” Tags and categories allow for finding relevant entries for, e.g., balag-drums. ICOBASE is still […] Read More

British Museum collections database

The British Museum collections database is getting larger: “The collections of the Department of the Middle East are now available online on the British Museum website: … The catalogue includes more than 230,000 objects and inscriptions from the Middle East, ancient and modern. There you will also find relevant objects from ancient Egypt and other parts of the […] Read More

DAI Archaeological Bibliography online users’ poll

“For many years the German Archaeological Institute [Deutsches Archäologisches Institut or DAI] has been compiling the Archaeological Bibliography which has established itself as an essential research tool in the area of ancient cultures of the Mediterranean Sea. Since 2002 it has been freely available on the internet and offers a thesaurus based systematical search in […] Read More

New Technology for Digitization of Ancient Objects and Documents

Announcement New Technology for Digitization of Ancient Objects and Documents; Joint project of the Archaeological Computing Research Group (ACRG) and the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), Southampton and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD), Oxford, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), Los Angeles-Philadelphia-Oxford-Berlin, and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature […] Read More

The dangers of citing the CDLI

Today, I’m happy to give you a “guest post” by Robert K. Englund, director of the excellent UCLA-Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Cuneiform Digital Library (CDLI) project which I reviewed earlier. In a highly interesting article by Azhideh Moqaddam describing the recent Jiroft discoveries (“Ancient geometry and “*Proto-Iranian” scripts, South Konar Sandal […] Read More

Website Review: CDLI (Addendum)

A little over a month ago, I reviewed the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. I’d like to add that the CDLI is part of a larger digital project, The Cuneiform Digital Library. Free Online Resources About the Ancient Near East From the Dawn of Writing to the End of Cuneiform. “The CDL is a collaborative network of […] Read More