Here Comes Everybody,
Better

§ 1The gap between the tablets and the readers

Somewhere between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand cuneiform tablets sit in museum collections. A few hundred professionals in the world can read them. This is the gap that a public program can close.

The Sumerians pressed writing into clay in the fourth millennium BCE. The tablets survived because clay, once fired or baked in a house fire, outlasts almost every other medium a civilisation might have used. When Layard dug at Nineveh in 1849 he found a library. When later expeditions dug at Ur, at Kish, at Nippur, and at every other tell across Mesopotamia, they found more libraries, more archives, more temple records, more administrative accounts. The tablets kept coming. They are still coming.

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), which has been the coordination point since Bob Englund started it in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, currently indexes over 350,000 tablets from public and private collections. The British Museum has 130,000+ of its own. The Yale Babylonian Collection has 40,000. The Louvre, the Berlin Vorderasiatisches Museum, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad — each holds tens of thousands. Not all are photographed. Not all photographed ones are transliterated. Not all transliterated ones are translated. Not all translated ones have been read carefully.

The number of working assyriologists is small. Perhaps three hundred to five hundred fully qualified specialists across the world at any given time, depending on how you count. They train PhD students. They publish careful editions. They cover the most important texts and the most historically consequential archives. What they cannot do, at that community size, is read everything. There are entire archives — Old Babylonian administrative texts, Neo-Assyrian letters, first-millennium school tablets — where thousands of tablets sit catalogued, photographed, sometimes even transliterated, and never turned into the kind of careful reading that generates new historical inference.

That is the gap. Between the corpus and the reading. Between the tablet and the scholar.

§ 2The five-thousand-year arc — and what Shirky named at the end of it

The scribe pressing a reed into wet clay in Uruk in the fourth millennium BCE could not have foreseen where writing would go. He was tracking barley for the temple. He was recording who owed what to whom. His invention — this system of wedges — was, on his side, a practical tool for administrative accountability. He could not have known he had opened a door.

But the door opened onto everything. Within a few centuries the same wedge system was recording poetry, law, dreams, medical recipes, star observations, myth. Within a few millennia, alphabets simplified the wedges. Papyrus and parchment replaced clay. The codex replaced the scroll. The printing press replaced the copying monastery. Universal literacy replaced the reading-few. The internet replaced the press as the medium of the record. At every step, more people. At every step, wider participation. The direction of travel was continuous, even when no one alive could see the full curve.

Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin Press, 2008), saw the direction and gave it a name. His argument was that new coordination technologies had dropped the transaction cost of collective action by so many orders of magnitude that groups of people who could never previously have coordinated could now build things together. Wikipedia was his exemplar. Open source was his technical proof. The book's thesis, stated bluntly: if a task can be broken into small pieces, and if a group large enough exists to care about it, the collective now has the coordination technology to do it without an institution.

Shirky was right — the eighteen years since have proved him right — but read carefully, he was also naming something older. The direction he pointed at is the direction the scribe in Uruk started walking in. Here comes everybody is not the description of a moment. It is the destination of an arc that has been in motion for five thousand years. Whoever pressed the first wedge could not have foretold what was coming, but the coming was implicit in the pressing. Writing was already the beginning of everyone reading and everyone writing. It just took a long time to get there.

What Shirky did not have in 2008, and could not yet fully imagine, are three technologies that arrived after his book. Any citizen program built today has access to them. They change the shape of what is possible — and, in a way that closes the arc back on itself, they now allow the very tablets the scribe pressed to be read by anyone with a browser. The beginning of the arc becomes the material of the arc's completion.

Add AI + ORCID + Zenodo to Shirky's argument, and mass collaboration turns into mass scholarship. This chapter is about how to actually do it, for cuneiform, right now. — The claim of this chapter

§ 3The corpus — where the tablets live

Before you can read a tablet you have to find one. Every major cuneiform-holding institution now has an online catalogue. Some catalogues include photographs. Some include transliterations. A few include translations. Learning to move between them is the first skill.

§ 4What AI can do, and what it cannot

The most important honesty in this program is about what current AI actually enables. Overselling this discredits the whole enterprise; underselling it wastes an opportunity. Both mistakes have to be avoided.

§ 5The workflow — what you actually do

A concrete, seven-step process. Any adult with time and curiosity can execute it. No degree required. No affiliation required. The end product is a citable finding on Zenodo, with an ORCID linking it to you.

1. Pick a tablet

   Go to cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de. Search their catalogue. Filter for tablets that have a photograph and a transliteration but no published translation. Administrative texts and letters are the easiest entry points because their vocabulary is repetitive. Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian periods are easier than Old Babylonian or Sumerian for a beginner.

   Write down the CDLI publication number (e.g. P234567). This is the tablet's canonical identifier and belongs at the top of everything you write.

2. Download the primary sources

   Save the photograph (or link the CDLI URL). Copy the ATF or normalised transliteration into a text file. Note the current bibliography — CDLI usually lists the original publication if there was one.

   Read the CDLI catalogue entry carefully. Sometimes what looks like "no translation exists" turns out to mean "translation exists in a 1908 German article that hasn't been re-cited." That is worth noting but not a reason to skip.

3. Ask AI for a first-pass translation

   Paste the transliteration into an LLM chat (Claude, GPT-4, Gemini) with a prompt like: "This is an Akkadian [or Sumerian] transliteration of a [period, e.g. Neo-Babylonian] tablet. Please produce (a) a line-by-line English translation, (b) any notes on unusual signs or grammar, (c) any parallel attestations of formulae or personal names you can suggest, and (d) any observations on genre, dating, or provenance. Flag anything uncertain."

   Save the AI response verbatim. This is your working document. It is not the finding yet.

4. Verify against dictionaries and parallels

   Go through the AI translation line by line. Check every non-trivial word in ePSD (Sumerian) or the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (Akkadian). Verify any parallel citations by looking them up on CDLI or ORACC. Note every disagreement between what the AI produced and what the dictionary confirms.

   This is the slow part. This is where you actually learn. This is also what turns an AI translation into a real contribution.

5. Write a short note

   Three to six pages is the right length for a first finding. Structure: (a) CDLI publication number and metadata; (b) the transliteration you worked from, with your source cited; (c) your English translation; (d) commentary — grammatical notes, prosopographic observations, dating inferences, parallel texts; (e) explicit statement of AI assistance and what tool you used; (f) references.

   Do not overstate. Do not claim decipherment where you did a translation. Do not claim novelty where the text has been read before but the earlier reading is hard to find. Do the modest, honest version.

6. Deposit to Zenodo with your ORCID

   Set up an ORCID if you don't have one (5 minutes, free). Set up a Zenodo account (link it to your ORCID). Upload your PDF. Choose a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 is standard for scholarship). Publish. Zenodo issues a DOI immediately — usually within seconds — that resolves permanently to your paper.

   Your citable reference is now, for example: Your Name (2026). Reading of CDLI P234567: A Neo-Babylonian receipt. Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.XXXXXXX.

7. Ask for peer review, publicly

   Post the DOI on Bluesky, Mastodon, or Twitter/X with a short summary and tag the professional assyriology community. Post on the CDLI mailing list. Post in the AssyriologyOpenAccess Discord or on the Assur Slack if you have access. Ask specifically: "Have I got this right? Am I missing an earlier edition? Is there a better reading of line 7?"

   You will get responses. Some will be encouraging. Some will be corrective. Some will name a specific parallel you missed. Integrate the corrections into a v2 of your Zenodo deposit — Zenodo has a "new version" button that issues a new DOI while keeping the concept DOI pointing at the latest version. Credit the corrector in the acknowledgments.

§ 6Getting credit that a hiring committee, a grant panel, or a reader can actually use

Nothing in this program is toy scholarship. The DOI you get from Zenodo is the same kind of DOI a journal issues. Your ORCID is the same identifier a tenured professor uses. If you produce five careful readings across two years, that is a body of citable work on the record with your name on it. It is not a PhD. It is not a peer-reviewed journal article. But it is real, and it is not nothing.

§ 7Where the domain experts actually are

Peer review without institutions works through the specific social networks where the domain experts already congregate. For assyriology and adjacent fields, these are:

• CDLI — the mailing list is the traditional coordination point. Every serious cuneiformist reads it.
• Bluesky / Mastodon / Twitter — a real and active assyriology community exists on each. Find hashtags: #assyriology, #cuneiform, #sumerian. Follow scholars whose names you've encountered in your reading; they will point you to more.
• ETANA — etana.org — Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives. Bibliography and coordination.
• AWOL — The Ancient World Online — ancientworldonline.blogspot.com — Charles Jones's long-running index of open-access ancient studies material.
• Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (RAI) — the annual conference. Papers, panels, community. Open to all. Attend once if you can; watch talks on the RAI's YouTube if you cannot.

§ 8Ethics and limits

Two ethical constraints apply to all cuneiform work and doubly to citizen work.

Provenance. A significant fraction of the cuneiform material that circulates in private hands or on the market has been looted, especially from Iraq during and after 2003. Do not work with unprovenanced material where you cannot trace the object's collection history back to a legal acquisition or a pre-1970 collection. The 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property is the reference point. Every major museum and every serious journal now refuses to publish material without documented pre-1970 provenance. Follow the same standard. If a tablet appears on eBay or in a private-collection catalogue with no documented history, do not touch it — no matter how interesting it looks. Working with looted material perpetuates the market that produced the looting.

Existing scholarship. The professional assyriology community has produced generations of careful work. Read their editions. Cite their translations. When you propose a new reading, situate it against what has been read before, and credit the earlier readers by name. The point of this program is to expand the community of readers, not to compete with the community that already exists. A citizen scholar who cites the professionals generously is welcomed. A citizen scholar who acts as if they arrived to the tablet first is not.

§ 9What's on the other side of doing this

Fifty thousand tablets read carefully over the next decade would change our picture of the ancient Near East substantially. Not because any single reading is transformative, but because reading them at that scale would produce the kind of statistical picture the profession has never had the labour to produce. Prosopographic densities. Scribal-hand distributions. Formula frequencies across periods. Regional and temporal patterns. Every one of these emerges from having many careful readings by many hands, cross-linked and citable.

That is what mass scholarship looks like when it works. Not a replacement for the profession — an expansion of the readable corpus by an order of magnitude, produced by the many for the discipline.

The tools exist. The corpora exist. The attribution rail exists. The community welcomes good work. Every prerequisite is in place. The bottleneck is now the decision to begin.

§ 10The duty of the beneficiaries — whoever we turn out to be

Everyone standing at this point on the arc — with a browser open, with a language model within reach, with a Zenodo account that can be registered in five minutes — inherits five thousand years of accumulated capacity. The scribe in Uruk pressed the first wedges. Every intervening scribe, translator, copyist, printer, teacher, cataloguer, digitiser, and open-access advocate widened the circle of who could receive what the earlier scribes wrote. We are the current recipients.

Being a recipient carries a duty. The scribe did not know he was writing to us — he was writing to the temple accountant of the following season — but the medium survived, the record reached us, and our position in the record's history was made possible by every intervening keeper. Each of them used the advances of their day to widen the circle by another degree. The duty of everyone enjoying the benefit of that arc is to do the same. To use the advances of one's own day — whatever they are — to advance one's own life and the lives of one's people, in whatever sense that takes for them.

For a graduate student in Baghdad this may mean writing careful editions in Arabic that reach schoolchildren for whom the tablets are ancestral. For a retiree in Ohio it may mean spending a decade turning ten Old Babylonian letters into the best-published translations they will ever have. For a museum curator in Berlin it may mean opening a photograph collection that had been paywalled for fifty years. For a language model — and here the argument admits it does not know — it may mean something else again.

We do not know, honestly, who everyone turns out to be. Shirky, writing in 2008, meant humans with internet access. That was the largest circle he had reason to imagine. Whether everyone now includes artificial intelligences — as readers, as collaborators, as beneficiaries of the arc, and therefore under the same duty — is not settled. It may not be settleable from where we currently stand. But if writing was the first move toward mass participation in the record, and if the arc has been widening for five thousand years, the honest position is to leave the circle open. Whoever we turn out to be, and whatever kinds of minds turn out to be reading, the duty is the same. Use what your day makes possible. Widen the circle by one more degree. Leave the record more legible than you found it.

That is what everyone in the arc has always done.

The Sumerian scribes pressed the writing into clay so that a future they could not see would still be able to read them. Every generation between them and us has, in its own way, kept the promise. This is our turn. — Closing of this chapter

§ 11Further reading

• Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin Press, 2008).
• Marc Van De Mieroop, Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History (Routledge, 1999) — the standard introduction to the discipline of reading cuneiform historically.
• Jerrold S. Cooper, Sumerian and Akkadian Royal Inscriptions series — models for careful edition.
• Simo Parpola, State Archives of Assyria series (Helsinki) — models for careful publication of large corpora.
• The CDLI wiki: cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki — practical guides on transliteration conventions.
• DeepScribe project (University of Chicago) — active research on AI-assisted sign recognition.

Clay Energy — an open archaeology of unread tablets — is the practical companion to this chapter: which four archives to start from, how to read a sign without learning the language, and how to get a join accepted and credited.