Botany and Literature in Ancient Mesopotamia—Primary Sources

The data used and generated during the execution of project PID2021125678NB-I00 are of a dual nature, both related to the discipline of the study of the languages and cultures of the ancient Near East. On the one hand, there are cuneiform clay tablets, the ‘primary sources’, specifically cuneiform texts dating mainly from the first millennium AD. The data cover a wide range of topics in line with the variety of genres of the sources used, from documents on medical and pharmacological content to religious or magical literature, including literary texts and lexicons. All the data is used internationally. The data relating to the primary sources, i.e. the cuneiform texts, are all accessible in the form of digitised images via the internet in the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth) database. This so-called ‘Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative’ makes the form and content of more than 400,000 cuneiform tablets, out of the approximately 500,000 existing copies found in public museum collections and private collections around the world, available to the academic public, but also to non-specialists. The project has used the primary sources from cdli.earth that are related to the research topic and has generated a database that provides detailed specific data from this ‘initiative’. The data is structured according to standards in the field of IP research, Assyriological studies, using a metadata form that includes the museum number of the cuneiform texts used, the reference to the critical edition of the same, the reference to the artefact index of the CDLI data collection, and the reference to the stable URL of CDLI. In this way, the data is easily locatable.

• From 2021-10-01 to 2026-02-28

• http://hdl.handle.net/10261/353792
• http://hdl.handle.net/10261/383542
• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jep.2022.115874
• https://www.ub.edu/ipoa/aula-orientalis/au-or-2024-422/
• http://hdl.handle.net/10261/383703,
• http://hdl.handle.net/10261/401440
• https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110778878-005

Recommended citation: Böck, B. (2026). Botánica y Literatura en la antigua Mesopotamia-Fuentes Primarias [DATASET] [Data set]. DIGITAL.CSIC. http://doi.org/10.20350/DIGITALCSIC/18123