Curated texts

Hand-picked tablets with machine-draft English, grouped by theme. Each text page is plain HTML: transliteration (where licensing allows), line-by-line machine English, and metadata.

• Remedies

  9 tablets

  Medical prescriptions from Assyrian and Babylonian healers: plants, oils, beer and the occasional incantation, with instructions for preparing and applying them.

• Omens

  8 tablets

  “If… then…” observations from Mesopotamian divination: birds, rivers, the moon and sun, dreams, births, and the entrails of sacrificed sheep.

• Epic Hunt

  9 tablets

  Narrative and mythological fragments: gods in council, monsters defeated, floods and a goddess's self-praise.

• Math

  8 tablets

  School and working mathematics from the 3rd to 1st millennium BCE: multiplication and reciprocal tables, squares, field and canal computations, and a gold-alloy problem.

• Love & Fertility

  6 tablets

  Rituals and recipes for restoring a man's desire (ŠÀ.ZI.GA, “rising of the heart”), and Babylonian love lyrics, several from the cult of Marduk and his consort Zarpanītu.

• Music

  6 tablets +5 coming soon

  Texts about making music in Mesopotamia: laments sung by the kalû-priests to drum and harp, a catalogue of the lamenters' repertoire, and an Old Babylonian liturgy with its song sections.

Other curated texts

• Royal monumental inscription (MDP 11, pl. 001-011)

  MDP 11, pl. 001-011 · Susa (mod. Shush) · Old Akkadian

  A long royal/monumental text published in Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse 11, machine-drafted in full.

  machine draft
  Read the tablet →