Cuneiform archives (CDLI)

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative and the Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts digitize and catalogue the huge administrative archives written in wedge-shaped script on clay tablets by the Ur III state and its Old Babylonian successors, plus the much later Astronomical Diaries that recorded Babylonian sky-watching night after night for centuries. Between them these databases hold tens of thousands of dated receipts, ledgers, and observations.

Because Mesopotamian scribes dated and itemized almost everything, this corpus supports the kind of quantitative economic and administrative tests that most ancient societies simply left no data for. Sticky wages in Sumer and Temple central banking both ask whether early Mesopotamian institutions behaved like a modern economy -- wages resistant to cuts, temples acting as proto-banks. Heaps' law in clay and Zipf in the archive look for the same statistical vocabulary-growth pattern text corpora usually show, this time in the vocabulary of clay accounting itself, and Intercalation as policy tests whether the state's calendar adjustments track political convenience rather than pure astronomy.