The online database offers possibilites of detailed investigations of Neo-Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian documentary sources beyond what can be provided by the historical sources, such as the Hebrew Bible, the Assyrian Annals or the Babylonian Chronicles.

It can thus help the researcher ask questions regarding the social cohesion of the immigrants, their ethnic and religious particularism in their new homes, and their degree of integration into the matrix of the indigenous populations. In the future, we expect a more complex manipulation of the data which will allow the researcher to provide answers regarding the exiles' kinship ties, family or business relations and social behavior. Comprehensive statistical analyses can lead to further insights regarding the exiles' living zones or habitats (urban, rural, or nomadic), or patterns of worship throughout various ethnic groups or clans, as reflected through individual personal names.

CTIJ will give researchers online access to close to 800 cuneiform sources. These texts will be fully searchable and annotated with relevant metadata. A later phase would see the introduction of data-mining techniques and advanced visualizations. This way, CTIJ will address the following two major obstacles in the study of the corpus: the dispersal of the data in various publications, and the enormous wealth of the data.

We hope that the project will benefit the research community and will enhance the possibilities of conducting historical and social investigations into the lives of the many individuals who made up the early Diaspora. We hope that our database will help make clearer what role the deportees and new-comers had in the societies they had come to live in and how they maintained and preserved their self-identity.