Chronology · 12 periods · 5500 BCE → 330 BCE
Full timeline →A scholarly reconstruction · v0.1
The history of Mesopotamia,
told by its tablets.
A curated narrative reconstruction of humanity's first great civilization — five thousand years of cities, gods, kings, accountants and astronomers, woven together from the primary sources themselves.
The state of the corpus · live
How far we've come, and how far is left.
The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative is the world's reference catalogue. We have indexed 106,994 of its 353,283 entries — and beyond that, an estimated 750,000 cuneiform tablets exist in museums and excavation stores worldwide, many still unpublished.
98,955 tablets in our corpus have never been translated into English. For many of them, no translation exists in any modern language. Each day, the engine closes a little more of this void — and re-reads its older work as it learns.
Without a photograph the tablet cannot be re-read. CDLI lists 103,496 photographed tablets in total — about 2,074 of those are still missing from our local cache, and many more tablets have never been photographed at all.
external snapshot as of 2026-05-12 · corpus counts live · last engine pass 2026-05-12
Help close the gap
Two ways to add a stone to the edifice.
Donate photographs
If you work in a museum, in a university collection, in archaeology, or simply have access to high-resolution images of cuneiform tablets — every photograph unlocks a tablet that the engine can read.
Right now 2,074 CDLI tablets that have a photograph somewhere are not yet in our local cache, and far more have never been photographed at all.
Get in touchFund translations
Every tablet the engine translates costs a few cents in compute. Multiplied by 98,955 tablets, it adds up — and most have never been translated into any modern language.
Your support pays directly for AI engine runs over the catalogue. Every contribution moves the translation bar above forward.
Get in touch
The Mesopotamian world
Between the Tigris and the Euphrates,
humanity's first cities, first laws, first stories.
Sumer, Akkad, Ur, Babylon, Nineveh — names from the deepest layer of human memory. What they wrote, on clay, has survived four thousand years of fire, flood, and forgetting. We read it again.
From the sources.
Every claim is anchored to a tablet — visible inline, with transliteration, translation, and scholarly note. No second-hand commentary.
Beautifully accessible.
Written for the curious reader, not the specialist. Three modes of entry: chronological, thematic, and the raw tablets themselves.
Open scholarship.
Built on CDLI, ETCSL, ORACC, and public museum collections. Translations are AI-assisted, scholar-validated, and confidence is always shown.
The chronology
Periods
Ubaid
Before writing — the first villages, the first temples.
Uruk Period
The birth of the city, the birth of writing.
Early Dynastic
City-states, kings, the first wars.
Akkadian Empire
The world's first empire under Sargon.
Ur III · Neo-Sumerian
A bureaucratic golden age, the Code of Ur-Nammu.
Old Babylonian
Hammurabi, the Epic of Gilgamesh, mathematics.
Old Assyrian
Aššur the merchant city — the great trade with Anatolia.
Middle Babylonian
The Kassite kings, international diplomacy.
Middle Assyrian
Aššur's first imperial expansion.
Neo-Assyrian
Empire, library, terror, scholarship.
Neo-Babylonian
Nebuchadnezzar, exile, late astronomy.
Achaemenid Persian
Persian rule, the long twilight of cuneiform.
~650 BCE · Library of Ashurbanipal
The flood, told a thousand years before Genesis.
Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, recovered from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. When George Smith first deciphered the flood narrative in 1872, he reportedly began undressing in the British Museum reading room from sheer excitement: the source of one of the world's most famous stories was, all along, here in clay.
Read the tabletAcross the eras
Themes
Mythology
Gods, heroes, the flood, the underworld.
The earliest stories humanity told itself about creation, the divine order, the heroic, and the afterlife — preserved in clay long before papyrus or parchment existed.
Law
Codes, contracts, justice.
From the Code of Ur-Nammu to Hammurabi's stele: the first attempts to write down justice, contracts, and the rules of common life — the deep ancestor of every legal system since.
Economy
Grain, silver, ledgers, trade.
Tens of thousands of tablets recording cattle distributions, silver weights, temple inventories, and merchant contracts. The world's first accounting — and the reason writing exists at all.
Astronomy & Mathematics
Stars, omens, base-60, geometry.
Babylonian astronomers tracked planets for centuries; their mathematicians invented sexagesimal arithmetic — the reason we still divide hours into 60 minutes and circles into 360 degrees.
Daily Life
Letters, recipes, schools, complaints.
A merchant's complaint about poor copper, a scribe's homework, a recipe for stew, a love song. The texture of everyday life four thousand years ago — startlingly familiar.
Writing & Literature
From accounting marks to the Gilgamesh epic.
The invention of writing itself, the slow drift from pictogram to cuneiform sign, the rise of literary form — and the first named author in human history, the priestess Enheduanna.
Writing
The wedge in the clay was the beginning of memory itself.
Temps forts
Highlights
Code of Hammurabi (stele)
Not the first law code, but the most complete and the most famous. Inscribed on a black diorite stele over two meters tall, displayed in a public place — law made visible, law made monumental.
LawEpic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI (the Flood)
The single most important literary discovery of the 19th century. It rewired the understanding of the Bible's literary context and proved that the Mesopotamian flood tradition is older. It is the oldest surviving epic poetry in human history.
MythologyWriting & Literature
Plimpton 322
Whatever its purpose, this single tablet shows that Babylonian mathematicians, working in base-60, had an arithmetic understanding of right triangles a millennium before Pythagoras was born.
Astronomy & Mathematics
Disk of Enheduanna
The literary tradition is no longer anonymous from this point. Authorship — the idea that a specific human voice composes a specific work — enters the historical record with her.
MythologyWriting & Literature
For the long horizon
“The full history is long. We tell it tablet by tablet, period by period, until the whole picture is here — sourced, beautiful, open.”
About this project12 periods · 6 themes · 11 curated · 106,983 catalogued · v0.1