Where this comes from, and the line we hold.

Why this page exists

Publishing cuneiform online is not only a copyright question — it is an ethical one. The tablets are the cultural heritage of Iraq, Syria and their neighbours, and the modern history of the antiquities trade is entangled with looting and war. This page sets out, plainly, where every kind of content on the site originates, how it is licensed, and the position we take on the provenance of the objects we describe.

Where the words come from

Every tablet page shows its own source on the "Source" line. Across the corpus the text comes from four kinds of source:

• Open scholarly corpora — transliterations and translations from ORACC (including the State Archives of Assyria online / SAAo, ETCSRI, RIAo and RINAP) and ETCSL (Oxford). ORACC editions are released under Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 3.0; we preserve the full editorial attribution (volume, editor, and the ORACC citation URL) on each tablet, and our reuse inherits the same share-alike terms.
• The CDLI catalogue — the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative supplies museum numbers, provenience and transliterations for the bulk of the catalogue. CDLI's text and metadata are reused with attribution to CDLI.
• Hand-curated editorial entries — written for this project from mainstream scholarship (Roth, George, Frame, Leichty, Novotny, Black/Cunningham/Robson, et al.), cited per tablet.
• Engine-generated translations — produced by an AI pipeline (Anthropic Claude) under a strict anti-fabrication prompt, labelled engine:… with an explicit confidence tier. See the engine page.

Where the photographs come from

We do not own any tablet photograph. Images are reproduced from third-party collections under their own terms, and the licence is shown on every tablet page:

• CDLI — most photographs are accessed through CDLI. Per CDLI's terms of use, these images remain the property of the holding museums and institutions and may notbe used commercially without their written permission. We reproduce them only for non-commercial, educational purposes, with museum and provenience attribution preserved per image. (We previously mislabelled these as "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0"; that has been corrected across the corpus to reflect the institutions' actual rights.)
• Wikimedia Commons and museum open-access programmes — public-domain or openly-licensed images (e.g. the Metropolitan Museum under CC0), with per-file attribution preserved.

On provenance — the position we take

The leading professional body in the field, the International Association for Assyriology, does not impose a blanket ban on engaging with unprovenanced material, but it asks scholars to respect the cultural-heritage laws of countries of origin, to support the preservation and, where warranted, repatriation of illegally-acquired objects, and never to act in ways that authenticate or stimulate the market for looted antiquities. The wider 1970 UNESCO Convention is the reference point for what counts as licit movement of cultural property. We try to act in that spirit:

• We are a tertiary aggregator. We do not buy, sell, appraise, authenticate or handle tablets, and we add nothing to the market. Every object we describe is already published in an established public catalogue (CDLI, ORACC, ETCSL) or a museum collection.
• We surface provenance rather than hide it. Each tablet shows its holding collection and, where the source records it, its findspot. Where provenance is unknown, we say so plainly instead of dressing the object up.
• We do not knowingly give a looted object its firstpublication, and we prefer sources whose licences and ethics are clear. Where a candidate source's terms do not permit reuse, we decline it rather than scrape it.
• We treat the texts as the heritage of their countries of origin. If a museum, source project or country-of-origin authority asks us to remove or correct an item, we act within seven days.

Corrections & takedowns

If you are a rights-holder, a source institution, or a country-of-origin authority and believe an image, text or attribution should be corrected or removed, please write through the contact form. We aim to act within seven days. The licensing of our own editorial text is set out in the terms of use.