Duration: 2004 to 2022

On the ruin-covered hill of the city of Assur, located in present-day Iraq and once the capital of the Assyrian Empire, German archaeologists unearthed several thousand clay tablets and fragments inscribed with cuneiform texts at the beginning of the 20th century. The majority of these artifacts of ancient Near Eastern written culture are now housed in the Museum of the Ancient Near East in Berlin. In addition to documents used for correspondence and record-keeping in administrative and commercial contexts, this extensive collection also includes texts whose contents—often spanning centuries and vast distances—have been preserved in writing.

These so-called literary cuneiform texts from Assur contain legal regulations and decrees, reports and narratives of a historical and mythical nature, fables, and words of wisdom; Regulations governing festival rituals and other religious ceremonies are found among them, as are poems, songs, prayers, and—among many other things—writings in which specialized knowledge from the disciplines of ancient Near Eastern scholarship is recorded.

Many of these literary texts are being studied Academy of Sciences and Humanities since they were last “in use” in Assur at the research center “Edition of Literary Cuneiform Texts from Assur” at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities .

The research center is engaged in systematically cataloging the corpus of literary texts from Assur and publishing documents that have not yet been published, or have been published only inadequately, in monographs that meet the highest standards of textual criticism. These form the monograph series “Cuneiform Texts of Literary Content from Assur” (KAL). The goal is to make textual evidence—which is of great significance for further research in the field of Ancient Near Eastern Studies—accessible through this comprehensive edition of this rich body of texts, thereby contributing to the opening of new insights into the intellectual worlds of a cultural sphere that has exhibited enormous political and cultural dynamism for millennia.

The research center's portal on the University of Heidelberg website