It’s not easy to access them for digitalisation. The museum which holds them, have to get them out of storage for you which involves a curator and his time. Also afaik many aren’t labelled extensive making it difficult to choose the ones you are looking for.

When your estimation is accurate, then there are likely hundred thousand fragments in simple labelled boxes, laying around in storages. To digitalise them would require a lot of money, the agreement of the museums and personnel.

Great, thanks. I've run across ORACC before, but I didn't know widespread digitization was part of their aim (i.e., I had the impression it was a database of artifacts digitized elsewhere).

> There are probably around 1-2 million cuneiform tablets that have been found so far. Many of them complete, but even more of them as fragments.

That's a pretty amazing number - that so many have survived. It seems like it would take too much luck, unless some library has endured this long.

Those tablets are indestructible once you expose them to fire. The records come from sacked cities. There's no shortage.

If you wanted to design a writing medium that enables archeology, it would be difficult to do better than clay tablets. Fired clay is great for records meant to last, being very fire and water resistant, while unfired clay was reusable if you just made it a bit wet again, great as reusable writing surfaces.

So many paper, parchment and papyrus records that were meant to be kept have been lost to fire and water over the millennia. Yet with clay tablets a fire not only struggles to harm the records that were meant to last, it turns all the temporary records, scratch pads and notes left around into long-lasting fired clay. Burn a Sumerian city to the ground and you create a snapshot of all their writing for archeologists to find millennia later