What we collect, and what we don't.

Who we are

Sumerian Book is an independent scholarly project run by a solo developer in France. It is not affiliated with any university, museum, or institution. The site is hosted in the United States. You can reach the project at the contact page.

What we collect

• Contact form data — when you write to us via /contact, we receive your name, email address, optional role/affiliation, the topic you selected, and the message you wrote. We use this only to reply to you. We never sell, share, or rent these messages.
• Basic server logs — our web server records the IP address, requested URL, browser user-agent, and timestamp of every page visit. This is standard, kept for at most thirty days, and used only to diagnose technical problems and stop abuse.
• No analytics, no advertising trackers, no behavioural cookies. The site does not load Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or any third-party tracking script. We do not build profiles of you.

Cookies

We use no advertising or tracking cookies. The site sets only essential session cookies if and when they are needed for a feature you opt into. Browsing the site read-only sets nothing.

Third parties we rely on

• Hosting: DigitalOcean (United States, New York datacenter).
• DNS & domain: Cloudflare (United States).
• Translation engine: Anthropic's Claude API (United States). The engine processes the public text of each cuneiform tablet to produce English translations. We do not send your personal data — only the tablet text and an image of the tablet itself.
• Source corpora: CDLI (Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative), ORACC, ETCSL, Wikimedia Commons, public museum collections. Their materials are used under their respective licences with attribution preserved on every tablet page.

Your rights (GDPR, CCPA, plain decency)

Wherever you live, you can ask us to: (1) tell you what data we hold about you, (2) correct anything that is wrong, (3) delete what you sent us, or (4) export it. Email us via the contact form and we will comply within thirty days. We do not require you to prove anything elaborate — your honest request is enough.

If you are in the European Union and believe we are mishandling your data, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your national data-protection authority (in France, the CNIL).

Data retention

Contact-form messages are kept as long as the project exists and we consider them potentially useful for the work (e.g. if you offered help with photographs or funding). You can ask for deletion at any time. Server logs are rotated after thirty days.

Children

The site is not directed at children under thirteen. We do not knowingly collect data from children.

Changes to this policy

If we change anything material, we will update the "last updated" date at the top of this page and, where reasonable, announce the change on the home page.