In the 1930s, it was usual for tablets to be treated separately from the other objects. In the Diyala, the inscribed material was put in a Tablet Catalogue and given numbers with a T-prefix. Ancient seal impressions with an inscription were often put in the Tablet Catalogue, thus splitting them off from the rest of the seal impressions and from the cylinder seals that were in the Object Register. The unfortunate result of the decision to split the seal impressions was that when Frankfort was publishing his ground-breaking book, Stratified Seals from the Diyala Region, he did not have access to all of the sealings. Therefore, our work will make it possible to supplement and improve even that great book.
Provenience is an extremely important category in the database.
By this term we mean the place where an object was actually found. We have entered this information in separate databases, since we found discrepancies between the field records and the various excavation reports and catalogues published over a span of fifty years. These provenience databases alone contain 29,353 records. While we work with the categories of objects, we also analyze the stratigraphy of the sites in the Diyala. This analysis allows us to decide which of our sources is correct.