Two archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 12 shown for “Cuneiform tablet: balanced account of Shu-ili” — 24 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-27 17:44 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Cuneiform tablet: balanced account of Shu-ili
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2040 BCE

Proto-Cuneiform tablet with seal impressions: administrative account of barley distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure, hunting dogs, and boars
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 3100–2900 BCE

Cuneiform tablet: balanced account of Dugga
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2039 BCE

Cuneiform tablet: balanced account of Kaamu
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2038 BCE

Cuneiform tablet impressed with cylinder seal: balanced account of barley
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2029 BCE

Cuneiform tablet: caravan account
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 20th–19th century BCE

Cuneiform tablet impressed with seals: administrative document inscribed in Achaemenid Elamite
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 500 BCE

Cuneiform tablet: temple account
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 482 BCE

Cuneiform tablet: animal account
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2042 BCE

Cuneiform tablet case impressed with four cylinder seals in Assyrian and Anatolian styles, for cuneiform tablet 66.245.17a: loan of silver
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 20th–19th century BCE

Cuneiform tablet: account of silver disbursements, Egibi archive
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 601 BC

Cuneiform tablet: account of flax deliveries, Ebabbar archive
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 612 BCE
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. 109 matched · 24 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. The archive returned no records for this term.0 matched
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-27 17:44 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.