Collection: Yale Babylonian Collection, New Haven, Connecticut, USA History

Founded in 1911, the Yale Babylonian Collection is a center of teaching and research. Located on the third floor of the Sterling Memorial Library, the collection houses over 45,000 artifacts. While the bulk of the collection is comprised of inscribed artifacts such as cuneiform tablets, it also houses many other artifacts from the ancient Near East, most notably cylinder and stamp seals, but also clay figurines, stone sculpture, and so forth. It is one of the largest collections of seals and textual material from ancient Mesopotamia in North America and ranks among the leading collections in the world. A complete reference library, a seminar room, and work space for visiting scholars invites researchers worldwide to conduct their research on primary materials. The Collection aims to preserve, publish, and make available for everyone the artifacts it houses. In 2017 the Yale Babylonian Collection became formally affiliated with the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History  This affiliation has opened up improved avenues for public exhibitions, as well as easy online dissemination of collection materials. 

Through generous support from the Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the National Endowment of the Humanities, two major digitization efforts are currently under way: By 2022 the entire collection of cuneiform artifacts will be digitized using high-resolution HDR photography. Approximately 25 % will also be captured employing a Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) camera dome, which was built by the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton. The second tier of the digitization project focuses on the cylinder and stamp seals. The cylinder seals are captured using a Betterlight system and Oxford’s SIANE seal imaging kit.  

Our current catalogue lists 34,754 items, a number that certainly will increase over time as new items previously uncatalogued will be added. Starting in 2022, textual sources will be transliterated and translated in a major effort to make the collection even more accessible for researchers worldwide. Apart from the CDLI, all images are available on the Peabody Museum’s search portal. Smaller sub-corpora will be shared with further online projects. 

Find out more: 

History of the Collection

Peabody Museum of Natural History

Peabody Museum Search Portal