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 impressed with three seals: fragment, content uncertain” — 61 records examined, 40 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-27 20:41 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 impressed with three seals: fragment, content uncertain
Artist not stated in the record · ca. mid-5th–mid-4th century 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 case impressed with three cylinder seals: loan of silver
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 20th–19th century BCE

Cuneiform tablet case impressed with three cylinder seals, for cuneiform tablet 66.246.18a: quittance for a loan in copper
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 20th–19th century BCE

Cuneiform tablet impressed with three cylinder seals: record of slave sale
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1637 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 impressed with three cylinder seals and three stamp seals: renunciation of claim
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 422 BCE

Cuneiform tablet case impressed with four cylinder seals in Anatolian and Old Assyrian style, for cuneiform tablet 66.245.16a: quittance for a loan in silver
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 20th–19th century BCE

Cuneiform tablet case impressed with three cylinder seals, for cuneiform tablet 66.245.14a: loan of silver
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 20th–19th century BCE

Cuneiform tablet case impressed with three cylinder seals, for cuneiform tablet 66.245.19a: legal decision by appointed judges
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 20th–19th century BCE

Cuneiform tablet case impressed with four cylinder seals, for cuneiform tablet 66.245.15a: quittance
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 20th–19th century BCE

Cylinder seal and modern impression: hunting scene
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2250–2150 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. 21 matched · 21 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. 7484570 matched · 40 examined · 40 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.0 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-27 20:41 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.