The InscriptiFact Image Database Applicationis designed to make high-resolution images of ancient Near Eastern inscriptions available to scholars over the internet. The University of Illinois has recently joined forces with the University of Southern California to support and develop the InscriptiFact Project. Its inaugural contribution is the Spurlock Museum Cylinder Seal Project, the first artifactual and analytical database to be coordinated with InscriptiFact. The first stage of the project has centered upon the documenting of a collection of 62 ancient Mesopotamian cylinder seals from the Spurlock, using multiple imaging techniques that will be described in this paper.

Wayne T. Pitard is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD in ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard in 1982. His research has focused on the Canaanite background of Israelite religion and on concepts of afterlife in Near Eastern cultures. As a member of the West Semitic Research Project, he has photographed a number of important Canaanite religious texts, images of which are available on InscriptiFact.