The civilizations of the ancient Near East produced the world's earliest written texts — in hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and alphabets — with which they described the first empires, recorded the first legal codifications, preserved the first love songs, and registered the first contracts, among states or individuals. Not surprisingly, these cultures elicited broad curiosity among later civilizations, our own not excepted, resulting in a flood of evaluation, scholarly or otherwise. While the discovery of new texts always leads to new evaluation, it is remarkable how assessments arrived at decades ago continue to be of much value, not only because they often carry editions of original documents, but because they contain insights minted freshly after first exposure to major documents.

ETANA (Electronic Texts and Ancient Near Eastern Archives) has digitized, and continues to digitize, texts selected as valuable for teaching and research relating to ancient Near Eastern studies. We have selected primarily editions that are outside of copyright, or with the permission of copyright holders. While the new electronic editions we have produced are under copyright, the ETANA project chooses to make these freely available for noncommercial teaching and research purposes.

UPDATES -- Stony Brook Contributions added to Core Texts

As part of a USAID grant to assist Iraqi universities rebuild their archaeology programs and collections, Stony Brook University in New York State has digitized 181 cuneiform text publications and archaeological site reports, including dissertations relating to archaeology in Iraq. Prof. Elizabeth Stone was the Principal Investigator for this grant. These texts are either out of copyright, or Stony Brook has received permission to digitize them. We are pleased to report that Stony Brook is contributing these digital texts to the ETANA Core Texts collection for free access to anyone engaged in teaching and research. Archival copies of the scanned texts are held by the Stony Brook Libraries. If Stony Brook University digitizes more cuneiform text publications and site reports, it will contribute these to the ETANA collection as well. Stony Brook will catalog the digitized titles before sending them to ETANA. We anticipate the Core Texts available on the ETANA site will almost double by the end of the year as the result of the materials donated from Stony Brook. Materials digitized by Stony Brook included print editions provided by Yale University Library.

ETANA-Abzu-news

Listing of Core Texts made available through ETANA (sorted by Title).
Listing of Core Texts made available through ETANA (sorted by Author).

For a full list of all Core Texts Titles, click here.
To download a title list with links (excel format) click here.

Listing of all electronic books indexed in ABZU (sorted by Title).
Listing of all electronic books indexed in ABZU (sorted by Author).

You can search for ETANA Core Text titles and other ANE resources in ABZU.