MUSEUM RECORDS · OPEN LICENCES · NAMED OBJECTS

Museum-grade archaeology.

Not a list of proofs. A list of objects, and of the museums that have them.

Every record on these pages was taken from a museum or archive that publishes its catalogue openly, and every photograph was copied only because its own source stated an open licence. Each object carries the museum's own number, its date as the museum records it, where it was found, and — where our archaeology catalogue has an audited row for it — what that row says the object does and does not support.

39

museums & collections

50

of 140 catalogue rows matched

79

openly licensed photographs

134

institutions named as holders

01 / THE CABINET

Look at the thing itself.

One photograph from each of the collections that has one. Every picture on this site but these is our own drawing; these are the objects.

  • Wikidata & Wikimedia Commons
  • Holding institution not recorded
  • The Israel Museum
  • The British Museum
  • Istanbul Archaeology Museums
  • The Louvre
  • Europeana
  • The Egyptian Museum
  • Rijksmuseum van Oudheden
  • The Vatican Library
  • The Bodmer Foundation
  • Bibliothèque nationale de France

Photographs are shown at the museums' own open licences, each credited on its own object. No museum here endorses a biblical reading of its objects.

02 / THE MUSEUMS

Choose a collection.

Two different relationships, never added together: the collections these records were fetched from, and the institutions those records name as holding the object. One tablet is both a catalogue record and a British Museum object.

OPEN COLLECTIONS THESE RECORDS CAME FROM

Eight museums, archives and catalogues that publish their records openly. Everything on this page was fetched from one of them.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

New York

The Met publishes its whole collection catalogue as open data, and marks which objects are free of copyright. It is the largest single source here by a wide margin.

THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

Cleveland, Ohio

Cleveland's open-access API let the museum itself filter by date, so every record here was returned as falling inside the biblical period. Most of its photographs are of objects from elsewhere in the ancient world, and the page…

THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

Chicago

The Art Institute's catalogue is open and names a findspot for almost every object. Its image server refuses a non-browser client, so the picture addresses and licences are recorded and no file was copied.

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Washington, DC

The Smithsonian's open-access search covers every one of its museums. Its holdings from the biblical world turned out to be thin: a documented demo key allows about thirty calls an hour, and of the records it returned only a…

EUROPEANA

across Europe

Europeana is not a museum. It gathers the catalogues of European institutions and publishes their descriptions under a single open licence, while each item keeps its own rights statement. The institutions behind these records…

WIKIDATA & WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Wikidata holds no object. It is how the named objects were resolved: each one was looked up once, checked against its expected name, and rejected if it turned out to be a person or a modern paper. The photographs come from…

ORACC

University of Pennsylvania

The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus publishes edited Assyrian and Babylonian texts project by project. Its records name the museum holding each tablet, which is where most of the institutions on this page come from. Its…

CDLI

an international project

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative keeps the standard catalogue of cuneiform tablets wherever they are held. Its own pages ask not to be harvested, so only its published bulk dump was used, verified against the checksum it…

INSTITUTIONS THESE RECORDS NAME AS THE HOLDER

Where the objects themselves are. Most of these institutions publish nothing openly — they are named as the holder inside records from the collections above.

THE BRITISH MUSEUM

London

THE LOUVRE

Paris

THE ISRAEL MUSEUM

Jerusalem

THE ISRAEL ANTIQUITIES AUTHORITY

Jerusalem

THE EGYPTIAN MUSEUM

Cairo

RIJKSMUSEUM VAN OUDHEDEN

Leiden

ISTANBUL ARCHAEOLOGY MUSEUMS

Istanbul

THE CHESTER BEATTY

Dublin

THE VATICAN LIBRARY

Vatican City

THE BODMER FOUNDATION

Cologny, Geneva

BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE

Paris

THE YIGAL ALLON CENTRE

Ginosar, Galilee

MAGDALA

Migdal, Galilee

CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN

Leuven

THE MUSEUM OF MEDITERRANEAN AND NEAR EASTERN ANTIQUITIES

Stockholm

ROYAL MUSEUMS OF ART AND HISTORY

Brussels

THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE

University of Chicago

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SYRIA

Damascus, Aleppo, Der-ez-Zor and Raqqa

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF IRAQ

Baghdad

THE YALE BABYLONIAN COLLECTION

New Haven, Connecticut

THE PENN MUSEUM

Philadelphia

THE VORDERASIATISCHES MUSEUM

Berlin

HATAY ARCHAEOLOGY MUSEUM

Antakya

THE HARVARD MUSEUM OF THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

Cambridge, Massachusetts

THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM

Oxford

THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES OF JORDAN

Amman

THE BIBLE LANDS MUSEUM

Jerusalem

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF IRAN

Tehran

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

New York

HOLDING INSTITUTION NOT RECORDED

Half of the named objects reach us with no holder recorded anywhere in our sources, and nearly half of the photographs are among them. Several are famous enough that their museum is common knowledge — but common knowledge is not…

NOT YET HELD

A museum we hold nothing from. The card says why, because the reason is almost never that the objects are not there.

THE RIJKSMUSEUM

Amsterdam

The Netherlands' national museum, in Amsterdam.

03 / NAMED, BUT WITH NO PAGE HERE

Everyone else the records name.

The cuneiform catalogues record a holder for almost every tablet, and these 105 institutions and private collections are named among them. We hold catalogue rows about their objects, no photographs, and nothing fetched from the institutions themselves — so they have a line here rather than a page.

An object in a case is not an argument. It is where one can begin.

Built from this project's own research corpus, retrieved 2026-10-17. The most photographed collection here holds 43 of these pictures. Sources, licences and checksums are registered in the project's source register.

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