Cuneiform Texts in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Vol. 1, Tablets, Cones, and Bricks of the Third and Second Millennia B.C.

This book is the initial publication in a four-volume series on the collection of cuneiform tablets and inscriptions in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. It is a scholarly study of objects acquired largely during the 1880s, when the Metropolitan became the first American museum to acquire a substantial number of cuneiform texts. Today the Museum's collection totals more than five hundred texts and fragments; the publication of these volumes will make these texts available in a manner that will instruct and inform as wide an audience as possible.

Cuneiform Texts in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume I: Tablets, Cones, and Bricks of the Third and Second Millennia B.C. presents 120 commercial texts, legal texts, and letters, along with cones and bricks, from ancient Mesopotamia. This material is offered in both transliteration and translation, with drawings and selected photographs of the tablets as well as descriptions, drawings, and photographs of the seal impressions appearing on them.

Features of special interest in this volume include the presentation of Sumerian ledger-account translations in modern accounting formats; allocations for the royal family of the Sumerian king Sulgi of the Third Dynasty of Ur; an Old Babylonian military confrontation with the Kassites, as disclosed in correspondence; Old Assyrian correspondence involving smuggling, moth-eaten textile shipments, legal testimony, and a caravan report presented in both textual translation and modern-ledger format; as well as new collations and translations of Amarna-period royal correspondence.

(This title was originally published in 1988.)