The Cuneiform Digital Palaeography Project

"The Cuneiform Digital Palaeography (CDP) Project is a joint research project between an inter-disciplinary team at the University of Birmingham and the British Museum, funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. The project has grown out of the success of its pilot incarnation in January 1999 as the Cuneiform Digital Forensic Project, an inter-disciplinary research project at the University of Birmingham. The CDP Project aims to establish a detailed palaeography for the cuneiform script. For while the importance of palaeography has long been taken for granted in its sister disciplines, this aspect of Assyriology is still very much in its infancy. Yet Assyriology is blessed with a rich supply of source material, and studies by various scholars on specific parts of the cuneiform repertoire have highlighted the vast potential on offer. Progress in this field to date has been restricted by the very magnitude of the data, by the limited availability of the source material in suitable format (hand copies of other hand copies of sources are inadequate), and by technological constraints..."