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 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 non-commercial teaching and research purposes.

UPDATES for Core Texts in 2005

Coinciding with the completion of the recent CDRI Grant to expand the Core Texts list, we are also in the process of migrating the core texts to a new server, changing the PDF delivery format, and establishing permanent URL's for each title. There have also been enhancements to the title sort retrieval lists, and a new search qualifier in ABZU that allows searching limited to electronic books generally, as well as searching only for ETANA core text titles.

Modest additions to the Core Texts lists will be made in 2005, though recent news of the massive Google initiative to digitize research collections leave unclear the future prospects of small scale digitization projects such as this.

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).

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.