Cuneiform — The Assyriologist

The Assyriologist — Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hittite: the tablet world entire.

The cuneiform-culture shelves: Oracc and CDLI, ETCSL’s Sumerian literature, eBL’s fragments, the Copenhagen Ugaritic Corpus (alphabetic cuneiform), and TLHdig shared with the Hittitologist.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these sixteen answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 19 September 2026): sux 245,387 · akk 134,127 · und 75,034 · hit 36,380 · eng 15,798 · qpc 8,931 · xeb 6,844 · uga 3,270 · elx 2,723 · xhu 832 … and 32 more (nabu axis cuneiform lists all).

The desk’s instruments

• The tablet world: ORACC (royal inscriptions, lexical lists, gold Akkadian/Sumerian lemmatization, aligned English), the CDLI catalog, ETCSL’s Sumerian literature, eBL’s Fragmentarium, the Copenhagen Ugaritic Corpus (alphabetic cuneiform), and TLHdig shared with the Hittitologist.
• The fragment desk: ORACC is in the --fuzzy trigram index, so search --fuzzy … --axis cuneiform finds broken lines.
• The deepest timeline: ORACC’s catalogue and regnal dates put 21,558 documents on the calendar — --century -7 reaches the Assyrian letters.

Working the cuneiform desk

The generic axis surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable cuneiform               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync cuneiform                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis cuneiform          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis cuneiform                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis cuneiform   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu show --random --source oracc     # pull a random tablet from the ORACC shelf
nabu show urn:nabu:oracc:saao-saa01:P224395:o.1-o.3 --parallel  # Akkadian beside its running English translation
nabu search --century -7 --axis cuneiform  # term-less browse — the 7th-century-BCE tablets on the regnal-date timeline, corpus order
nabu search --fuzzy "a-na LUGAL" --axis cuneiform  # trigram fragment search — "to the king", straight off the tablet
nabu search --lemma šarru --lang akk --axis cuneiform  # the gold ORACC Akkadian lemmatization — šarru behind every LUGAL

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “Attestations of šarru ‘king’ — as lemma, not spelling.” → nabu_search (lemma: šarru, lang: akk) — Logographic LUGAL spellings resolved through ORACC’s lemmatization — the first hits are the Cyrus Cylinder’s opening lines, each with the surface form shown beside the lemma.

Terminal setup

• ORACC, CDLI and ETCSL text is stored in Latin transliteration (subscript indices, {d}-style determinatives) — display.md ships no cuneiform font and none is required. No RTL or CJK concerns.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the twenty-five research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.