The Laboratory of Assyriology (Labassi) was born in 1999 on the initiative of prof. Claudio Saporetti at the Department of Historical Sciences of the Ancient World of the University of Pisa, with the task of investigating some specific aspects of mesopotamian civilization and of elaborating them digitally with the aid of the most up-to-date technological devices.

Labassi takes up, harvesting its ten-year experience, Project ALTAN ("Linguistic Analysis of Assyrian and Nuzian Texts") and "Cybernetica Mesopotamica", both operating in Italy and abroad in the 70s and 80s, and Project AEC ("Electronic Analysis of Cuneiform writing"), active at the University of Pisa from 1987, which undertook, first in Europe, the digitalization of akkadian sources.

From the year of its foundation, Labassi has focused its attention on the study of the civilization of the Diy¡la and particularly of the Kingdom of Ešnunna during the Old Babylonian period (XX-XVIII century BCE), both from a historical-philological and an archeological point of view.

In 2003 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs entrusted prof. Saporetti, as director both of the Centre for Diy¡la Studies of the Geo-Archeology Association and of Labassi, with the task of digitally cataloguing the cuneiform texts of the Iraq Museum of Baghdad, as the italian contribution to the preservation of the iraqi cultural heritage, put in jeopardy during the last war. The work, actually operative from 2005, enlists the contribute of ENEA for virtual reproduction of the clay tablets in 3D (Project kima labirišu).

The Laboratory, thanks to the profitable cooperation both of scholars of the mesopotamian civilization and of information technology experts, has kept up-to-date with regard to the development of the application of information sciences to the field of humanities, and means to offer its fruitful contribute for a better enjoyment of the cultures of the Ancient Near East by means of information technology.

Besides the operational and voluntary contribution of students of the University of Pisa, Labassi benefits from fundings from the University and from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE).