Editing Cuneiform (section)

==Archaeology==
Between half a million<ref name=BAR/> and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000<ref name=DigHamm/>–100,000 have been read or published. The [[British Museum]] holds the largest collection (approx. 130,000 tablets), followed by the [[Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin]], the [[Louvre]], the [[Istanbul Archaeology Museums]], the [[National Museum of Iraq]], the [[Yale Babylonian Collection]] (approx. 40,000), and [[University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology|Penn Museum]]. Most of these have "lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published",<ref name=BAR>{{citation|url=http://members.bib-arch.org/publication.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=31&Issue=2&ArticleID=10|title=Cuneiform Tablets: Who's Got What?|journal=Biblical Archaeology Review|volume=31|issue=2|year=2005|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140715000414/http://members.bib-arch.org/publication.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=31&Issue=2&ArticleID=10|archive-date=July 15, 2014}}</ref> as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world.<ref name=DigHamm>{{citation|url=http://pages.jh.edu/~dighamm/version2/research/2003_03_Museums%20and%20the%20Web%20Conference%202003.pdf|first1=Lee|last1=Watkins|first2=Dean|last2=Snyder|title=The Digital Hammurabi Project|publisher=The Johns Hopkins University|year=2003|quote=Since the decipherment of Babylonian cuneiform some 150 years ago museums have accumulated perhaps 300,000 tablets written in most of the major languages of the Ancient Near East – Sumerian, Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian), Eblaite, Hittite, Persian, Hurrian, Elamite, and Ugaritic. These texts include genres as variegated as mythology and mathematics, law codes and beer recipes. In most cases these documents are the earliest exemplars of their genres, and cuneiformists have made unique and valuable contributions to the study of such moderns disciplines as history, law, religion, linguistics, mathematics, and science. In spite of continued great interest in mankind's earliest documents it has been estimated that only about 1/10 of the extant cuneiform texts have been read even once in modern times. There are various reasons for this: the complex Sumero/Akkadian script system is inherently difficult to learn; there is, as yet, no standard computer encoding for cuneiform; there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world; the pedagogical tools are, in many cases, non-optimal; and access to the widely distributed tablets is expensive, time-consuming, and, due to the vagaries of politics, becoming increasingly difficult.|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140714163229/http://pages.jh.edu/~dighamm/version2/research/2003_03_Museums%20and%20the%20Web%20Conference%202003.pdf|archive-date=July 14, 2014}}</ref>