Was the world's first museum in Ur?

Report on Sir Leonard Woolley's excavations at Ur in the 1920's, focusing on the discovery of what seems to be the world's oldest museum, dating from around 530 BC.
Artifacts from Ur's earlier history seem to have been purposefully collected by Princess Ennigaldi, daughter of Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.
The article also discusses the motives for making such a collection. Ur in this last phase of its development was, according to Woolley, obsessed by its history. The rulers of the city preferred to dwell on past glories and not look to the threatening future ...

Archaeology along the Hittite Way

Read an account of discoveries old and new in Anatolia - the heartland of the ancient Hittite Empire - and how to make the most of a visit to the sites (from the Archaeology News Network blog)

Babylonian magic bowls : new database

The University of Southhampton's Virtual Magic Bowl Archive (VMBA) is launching a new database to record Jewish and non-Jewish personal names found in Babylonian incantation bowls from the 5th to 8th centuries CE, compiled as part of a British-Israeli research project (BIRAX).

Go to the VMBA website to find out about the new project and how to contribute.

You can also look at the results of a previous project - Aramaic Magical Texts from Late Antiquiry (AMTLA)

The royal cemetery of Ur: exhibition

For those of you who can't make it to the University of Pennsylvania on 30th April for the grand re-opening of the Penn Museum's "Iraq's ancient past" exhibition focusing on the discovery and excavation of the royal cemetery of Ur by C. Leonard Woolley in the 1920's, here's a link to the Museum's website for all the historical background and pictures of some of the treasures, including the famous bull-headed harp and the spectacular jewelery of Lady Pu-abi   
Archaeology website Past Horizons also discusses "Iraq's ancient past", with more photographs of the exhibits and of the excavations at Ur.

Cuneiform Digital Library: link and updates

The Cuneiform Digital Library is an initiative of the University of California at Los Angeles and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and is supported by an international group of Assyriologists and museum curators.  Catalogue records for and images of the cuneiform tablets housed in museums across the USA, Europe and the Middle East have been made available to view. Currently over 246,000 items have been catalogued

Recent projects involve:

• the digitization of the 61 items in the Kalamazoo Valley Museum Collection

http://tinyurl.com/3dm5uav

• the digitization of 42 items from the Saint Louis Art Museum 

http://tinyurl.com/3bodcdu

Are you missing the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary?

Dip into this valedictory post on the AWOL (Ancient World OnLine) blog, which contains links to a variety of documents (mostly open access) on the CAD, including the Annual Reports (from 1991), articles and the online CAD itself - all 21 volumes of it, from A-Z

Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago - complete!

This 21 volume lexicon of ancient Akkadian dialects, 86 years in the making, is finally complete. The first volume was published in 1956.
Martha Roth, Professor of Assyriology, and Editor-in-Charge for the past 11 years, discusses the final volume in this YouTube video

SOAS has access to the online version of the dictionary through the Library catalogue, and two sets in print at L. Ref QED413 / 106059 and 263535