Recently Published Catalogues of Cuneiform Collections

CDLN 2010:4

Cuneiform Digital Library Notes (ISSN: 1546-6566)

Published on 2010-12-15

© Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License except when noted otherwise and in the case of artifact images which follow the CDLI terms of use.

Robert K. Englund

University of California Los Angeles

Two recent volumes of cuneiform texts are resulting in headaches for CDLI. CUSAS 16 by Steven Garfinkle, Herbert Sauren and Marc Van De Mieroop comprises an edition of the Columbia University Library collection with its very welcome set of collated transliterations, but the authors unfortunately did not prepare a full text concordance for the publication, in particular of Robert Lau, Old Babylonian Temple Records (=Columbia University Oriental Studies 3; New York 1906, reprinted 1966), even though this historically interesting volume contained often detailed catalogue and transliteration content on the texts, and was the basis for their inclusion in both Manuel Molina's BDTNS and in the CDLI. Based on OTR, ABTR and two smaller publications, CDLI (as BDTNS) has 279 entries for Ur III CUL texts that must be lined up with this new publication prior to the entry of its catalogue to our own. Thus, just looking through the 1906 catalogue, OTR 42 is apparently CUSAS 16, no. 125; OTR 199 appears to be CUSAS 16, no. 121; etc., but, given the time involved in tracing catalogue data through the copies and transliterations offered in CUSAS 16, a singularly unrewarding job in the post-publication stage, it is unlikely that the work will be done. As a consequence, Lau's catalogue and annotation efforts are likely to eventually disappear from our increasingly electronic records. Only the 61 OTR tablets that included hand copies were cross-referenced in the volume, and the 1906 copies were republished together with those of the remainder of the CUL texts left in the US many years ago by the co-author H. Sauren.

It remains, moreover, a mystery what aside from collations noted in transliterations but not noted in the hand copies, the purpose can be in the (re)publication of this large set of dated hand copies, already used by B. Jagersma and R. de Maaijer to produce CUL tablet transliterations freely available through BDTNS, together with their hand copies through CDLI, and the same use of legacy hand copies has happened in a second recent volume, YOS 15. Uncollated copies by A. Goetze in this latter book will compete for specialist attention against those of the same texts that have been produced by leading specialists, for instance in the case of publications by M. Sigrist, or D. I. Owen. Fair enough; this is presumably a sort of posthumous Festschrift, or a clearing of someone's desk, but then after many decades in waiting—publication permission for a number of small collections seems also granted to Yale Press from the beyond—the accurate reporting of the physical whereabouts of the published texts, as well as cross-references of legacy research to more recent publications are the more vital. Beyond contacting collection managers to verify reported holdings, there are many resources now available to do this for those who do not have the inclination, or the files to themselves check for previous publications. In the case of collection verification, we have some cause for concern. To take one example, texts 159, 200 and 205 are reported p. 73, with acknowledgement p. x, to be at Hunter College, NY. However following a time-consuming and ultimately unsuccessful correspondence with Julio L. Hernandez-Delgado, Head, Archives & Special Collections, Hunter College Libraries, then with Stephen Kowalik, Head of Hunter's Judith and Stanley Zabar Art Library, and finally with Professors Green and Koehl of the Department of Classical and Oriental Studies, I have given up the chase after these three tablets that are in clear need of collation and imaging. Who then did the editors of YOS 15 speak to at Hunter about these texts? Or is there another Hunter College in New York State that we are not aware of? Of course this need not be the failing of the editors of disparate cuneiform collections, where particularly in colleges and their various libraries such unusual artifact collections can be difficult to find. But to avoid potential problems in locating a published artifact is precisely why catalogues need to be meticulous—and open to inspection and corrections by experts—and where tablets from legacy work can no longer be found at the time of publication, this fact should be noted, sparing others from wasting their own time in the search. In the case of referencing earlier editions of texts published in the volume, no one has withheld relevant resources from the editors of YOS 15, which would have constituted the only justification I can see for the unprofessional bibliographical work that went in to it, if justification were sought. If a text is reported to be in a Saint Louis collection, then simply search for Saint Louis in one of the online catalogues, and check what you find against texts you propose to publish; these are after all not British Museum numbers of texts. Where hand copies or photos of tablets without further bibliographical data are prepared for publication, it is, similarly, a quick matter for the Assyriologist to simply check some section of the texts' transliterations against those offered online. You need not even be a registered user of BDTNS to search for the combination “ca3-gal cidim-e-ne” (using that site's “c” for “š”) in line 2 of YOS 15, 206, where the user will see that this text is entered as D. I. Owen, MVN 15, 107. Collaborators of research efforts to gather and make available primary cuneiform sources for cuneiform studies, for related disciplines and for the global community of informal learners are, unfortunately and unnecessarily, stymied by this lack of publication care, leaving us to do the work of others in cleaning up defective or incomplete catalogues; outsiders like ourselves, however, must work without access to internal resources, for instance the letters and notes of Goetze, that will have been available to those participating in a collective publication.

CUSAS 16's failings will not be repaired in the near future, if ever, but some of those of YOS 15 can be removed, at least for texts from epigraphic periods marked by online collaborations, that is, now nearly all periods of the late 4th and of the 3rd millennium BC, but, with the exception of the Old Assyrian corpus now in CDLI, the Hittite texts in the Hethitologie Portal Mainz and growing data sets in the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, relatively little from later periods. We of course cannot include in these resources those internal files held back from public view, but apparently not consulted in this publication by Yale editorial staff. One might wonder why even Yale's own catalogue publication of 21 of the YOS 15 entries in CBCY 2 and 4 was not cross-referenced in the concordances, where in the 1990's Yale curators expended some effort in compiling, with public funding, a full electronic catalogue of their holdings that is being exported and published piecemeal in paper volumes, however with the full electronic catalogue itself jealously guarded from public access among others under the claim that it constitutes Yale University intellectual property. Below is a list of those entries to YOS 15 that were available for research prior to its appearance, including some 60 texts noted by the editors, above all 33 from the former collection of the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Rochester, New York, published in more reliable form by M. Sigrist in 1991, and sold at auction in 2003; with the kind collaboration of M. Molina, I was able to identify, using online tools available to anyone, anywhere, two dozen more texts as having already been published, or distributed through persistent online websites. Where photos and catalogue data of otherwise unpublished texts are freely available online, and, as we at CDLI have tried to make abundantly clear, permanently archived, they should be noted somewhere in text editions that they silently support; such references are set here in brackets. With my own, and the limited current online coverage of 2nd and 1st millennium texts, I cannot speak to the accuracy of their respective catalogue entries in YOS 15.

YOS 15 Publication history Collection Museum no
1 Porter, H. and Pinches, Th., PEF Quarterly Statement 32 (1900) 123-124 (photo) and 273 (copy); Pientka, R., Die spätaltbabylonische Zeit (1998) 133-134 (noted in YOS 15 catalogue, not concordance); Lafont, B., AUB catalogue no. 23 (forthcoming, Fs Lenoble) = [http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/P387646] (photo) (not noted in YOS 15) American University of Beirut Archaeological Museum, Beirut, Lebanon (AUB) AUB 34.57
20 CBCY 2, p. 57, NBC 7348 (the CBCY volumes were not referenced in YOS 15) Yale Babylonian Collection, New Haven, Connecticut, USA (YBC) NBC 7348
21 CBCY 2, p. 72, NBC 7850 YBC NBC 7850
22 CBCY 2, p. 91, NBC 8696 YBC NBC 8696
23 CBCY 4, p. 119, YBC 6509 YBC YBC 6509
24 CBCY 4, p. 190, YBC 9959 YBC YBC 9959
25 CBCY 2, p. 73, NBC 7858 YBC NBC 7858
26 CBCY 2, p. 74, NBC 7885 YBC NBC 7885
27 CBCY 4, p. 142, YBC 7567 YBC YBC 7567
28 CBCY 4, p. 200, YBC 10436 YBC YBC 10436
30 CBCY 4, p. 190, YBC 9957 YBC YBC 9957
38 CBCY 2, p. 32, NBC 6290; Charpin, D., MOS Studies 2 (1998) 195 + n. 36 YBC NBC 6290
39 CBCY 2, p. 31, NBC 6270 YBC NBC 6270
40 CBCY 2, p. 33, NBC 6306 YBC NBC 6306
41 CBCY 2, p. 33, NBC 6312 YBC NBC 6312
42 CBCY 2, p. 33, NBC 6308 YBC NBC 6308
43 CBCY 2, p. 31, NBC 6264 YBC NBC 6264
44 CBCY 4, p. 246, YBC 13339 YBC YBC 13339
45 CBCY 2, p. 34, NBC 6320 YBC NBC 6320
47 CBCY 2, p. 33, NBC 6310 YBC NBC 6310
48 CBCY 2, p. 31, NBC 6276 YBC NBC 6276
49 CBCY 2, p. 32, NBC 6282 YBC NBC 6282
52 [https://cdli.ucla.edu/P270635] (not noted in YOS 15; the Cornell Library texts are being prepared for publication in CUSAS 15 by A. Gadotti and M. Sigrist) Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York, USA (RMC-CUL) RMC 1
53 [https://cdli.ucla.edu/P270643] (") RMC-CUL RMC 9
54 [https://cdli.ucla.edu/P270736] (") RMC-CUL RMC 116
55 [https://cdli.ucla.edu/P270658] (") RMC-CUL RMC 24
56 [https://cdli.ucla.edu/P270683] (") RMC-CUL RMC 52
57 [https://cdli.ucla.edu/P270674] (") RMC-CUL RMC 42
58 [https://cdli.ucla.edu/P270660] (") RMC-CUL RMC 26
59 [https://cdli.ucla.edu/P270656] (") RMC-CUL RMC 22
72 Stol, M. JCS 25 (1973) 228; Charpin, D., JA 270 (1982) 47 n. 47 (noted in YOS 15 catalogue, not concordance) Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania, USA (Allegheny) Allegheny 15
73 Owen, D. I. & Stone, E., MC 3, 27; Westbrook, R., AfO Beih. 23 (1988) 138 (noted in YOS 15 catalogue, not concordance); [http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/P270638] RMC-CUL RMC 4
96 Richardson, S., OrNS 74 (2005) 42-50 (noted in YOS 15 catalogue, not concordance) Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA Smith College 272
98 Michalowski, P., Letters no. 108; Lafont, B., AUB catalogue no. 19 (forthcoming, Fs Lenoble) = [http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/P200495] (not noted in YOS 15) AUB AUB 34.53
99 TCS 1, 132 (noted in YOS 15 catalogue, not concordance); Michalowski, P., Letters no. 166; Chiera, E., CBCT-PUL Ex 1104 (not noted in YOS 15) Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey, USA PUL Ex 1104
100 Steinkeller, P., Sale Documents 95 (noted in YOS 15 catalogue, not concordance) McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois, USA McCTS 26
101 Steinkeller, P., Sale Documents 117 (noted in YOS 15 catalogue, not concordance) Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey, USA (PTS) PTS 1004
102 Princeton 1, 365 PTS PTS 533
103 Rochester 233 sold; was Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Rochester, New York, USA (CRCDS) was Crozer 87
104 Rochester 131 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 95
105 Allred, L., Cooks and Kitchens 234, 1; id., Fs Sigrist 16, no. 4 (not noted in YOS 15) private: Garrett, Robert, Baltimore, Maryland, USA Garrett 1
114 Rochester 159 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 76
116 Rochester 167 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 80
120 Rochester 165 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 75
124 StLouis 156 (not noted in YOS 15) Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, USA (Kenrick) Kenrick 13
127 StLouis 155 (not noted in YOS 15) Saint Louis City Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri, USA (SLCAM) StLCAM 131:22
128 StLouis 148 (not noted in YOS 15) SLCAM StLCAM 132:22
131 Rochester 110 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 78
132 Rochester 106 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 79
133 Rochester 105 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 81
134 Rochester 138 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 84
135 Rochester 123 (not 12!) sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 82
137 Rochester 129 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 89
138 Rochester 124 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 90
139 Rochester 140 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 91
141 Rochester 113 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 92
142 Rochester 119 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 93
143 Rochester 135 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 94
144 Rochester 120 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 96
145 Rochester 118 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 34
146 Rochester 169 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 7
147 Rochester 145 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 32
148 Rochester 121 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 10
149 Rochester 107 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 14
150 Rochester 132 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 17
151 Rochester 117 (missed in concordance p. 78) sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 18
152 Rochester 109 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 15
153 Rochester 146 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 21
154 Rochester 127 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 20
155 Rochester 144 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 23
156 Rochester 115 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 25
158 Goetze, A., JCS 17, 9 etc. (“Miss”[ouri] in subsequent publications mistakenly “Mississippi”); Klein, J., ZA 80 (1970) 38; Owen, D. I., JCS 33 (1979) 260; id., ASJ 15 (1993) 145 36; Michalowski, P., Fs Łyczkowska (2009) 152 (not noted in YOS 15) Missouri School of Religion (“Bible College of Missouri”; reportedly on loan to the Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri-Columbia), Jefferson City, Missouri, USA MSR 1
166 Johnston, M., CUCT 4; Cohen, M., Calendars 98 (not noted in YOS 15) Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, USA (CUA) CUA 4
167 Johnston, M., CUCT 117 (not noted in YOS 15) CUA CUA 117
169 Johnston, M., CUCT 115 (not noted in YOS 15) CUA CUA 115
170 Rochester 12 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 85
176 MVN 15, 115 (not noted in YOS 15) Allegheny Allegheny 10
186 Johnston, M., CUCT b (not noted in YOS 15) CUA CUA b
189 Johnston, M., CUCT 1 (not noted in YOS 15) CUA CUA 1
193 Rochester 136 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 97
195 Rochester 239 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 88
200 SMS 2-3, 15 12 (not noted in YOS 15) Hunter College, New York, New York, USA ? (not located) HC 1 ?
201 Lafont, B., AUB catalogue no. 40 (forthcoming, Fs Lenoble) = [http://cdli.ucla.edu/P387663] (not noted in YOS 15) AUB AUB 34.74
206 MVN 15, 107 (not noted in YOS 15) Allegheny Allegheny 5
212 Johnston, M., CUCT a (not noted in YOS 15) CUA CUA a
213 MVN 15, 248 (not noted in YOS 15) Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA Wellesley 57f
214 Rochester 166 sold; was CRCDS was Crozer 83
Cite this Article
Englund, Robert K. 2010. “Recently Published Catalogues of Cuneiform Collections.” Cuneiform Digital Library Notes 2010 (4). https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/articles/cdln/2010-4.
Englund, R. K. (2010). Recently Published Catalogues of Cuneiform Collections. Cuneiform Digital Library Notes, 2010(4). https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/articles/cdln/2010-4
Englund, R. K. (2010) “Recently Published Catalogues of Cuneiform Collections,” Cuneiform Digital Library Notes, 2010(4). Available at: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/articles/cdln/2010-4 (Accessed: November 2, 2024).
@article{Englund2010Recently,
	note = {[Online; accessed 2024-11-02]},
	address = {Oxford; Berlin; Los Angeles},
	author = {Englund, Robert K.},
	journal = {Cuneiform Digital Library Notes},
	issn = {1546-6566},
	number = {4},
	year = {2010},
	publisher = {Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative},
	title = {Recently {Published} {Catalogues} of {Cuneiform} {Collections}},
	url = {https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/articles/cdln/2010-4},
	volume = {2010},
}

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