OpenGlyph — Catalogue of the American Public DomainJurisdiction: United StatesRev. 2026.08
Images / art

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: fragment of an Emesal prayer” — 24 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-08-28 00:11 UTC · fetched live for this request

Object
Public domainThe Met’s isPublicDomain field is true for this object.
CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian’s metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Not shownAnything failing its archive’s rights field is dropped server-side and never appears here.

Smithsonian Open Access: HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an Emesal prayer

Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an Emesal prayer

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2nd–1st century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet: Emesal prayer

Cuneiform tablet: Emesal prayer

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2nd–1st century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an astronomical table (?)

Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an astronomical table (?)

Artist not stated in the record · ca. late 1st millennium BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an exercise tablet

Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an exercise tablet

Artist not stated in the record · ca. late 1st millennium BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an account

Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an account

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2600–2350 BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an account

Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an account

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2600–2350 BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an accounting record (?)

Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an accounting record (?)

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 7th–4th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an account record (?)

Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an account record (?)

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 604–562 BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an accounting record

Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an accounting record

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 7th–4th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet: unidentified fragment

Cuneiform tablet: unidentified fragment

Artist not stated in the record · ca. late 1st millennium BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet: Old Babylonian balag to the mother goddess Aruru

Cuneiform tablet: Old Babylonian balag to the mother goddess Aruru

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 19th–16th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an agreement concerning a dowry (?)

Cuneiform tablet: fragment of an agreement concerning a dowry (?)

Artist not stated in the record · ca. late 5th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
What was queried

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. 30 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. HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable

These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-28 00:11 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.