Objectives

Valorize and exploit the old Babylonian cuneiform tablets, curated by the RMAH, to the international scientific community as well as to the general public.

Objective 1

Our goal is to make IIIF a natural part of the RMAH’s data infrastructure. We do this by embedding its principles and technologies directly into the museum’s core systems and workflows. This means aligning with long-term IT strategies, helping staff build the right skills, and gradually weaving IIIF into everyday practices like digitisation, publication, and collection management.

Objective 2

This project aims to unlock the RMAH’s collection of Old Babylonian clay tablets for international research. By linking and enriching the tablets with other digitised collections worldwide, we make them part of a broader scientific network. We focus on identifying names, places, and institutions mentioned in the texts, and connect these with international databases. Using prosopographical research, a research method who focuses on describing common traits of a certain societal group of people, and semantic annotation (a method to describe the proces of how people communicate based on context, we create meaningful links between objects. Supported by open data and automated analysis tools, this approach offers richer historical insights and enables cross-institutional comparison.

Objective 3

Furthermore, we are creating a digital corpus of Old Babylonian clay tablets by transcribing and translating about 65 pieces. These are combined with high-quality composite images and multilingual metadata, all structured within a FAIR-compliant IIIF data model and published on the CUNE-IIIF-ORM platform. At the same time, we experiment with OCR methods for Cuneiform, using annotated image data and combining handwriting and speech recognition techniques. This iterative workflow supports both manual and automated annotation of roughly 350 tablets. The resulting corpus will form the basis for a scholarly edition in Akkadica and contribute to international research through at least one peer-reviewed article and a conference presentation.

Objective 4

Finally we unite Old Babylonian tablets from museum collections worldwide in a single digital corpus and scholarly edition, making it possible to (re)contextualize them for broader audiences. One case study will be turned into a narrative that illustrates everyday life in Babylonia 4,000 years ago, serving as the foundation for a virtual exhibition with a digital overlay in the museum. In parallel, we will host a scientific conference on digital Assyriology, bringing together experts from different disciplines to share insights and results. The outcomes will be published through conference proceedings or a special journal issue, strengthening both academic knowledge and public engagement with Mesopotamian heritage.