David I. Owen Cuneiform Tablet Photo Archive

To Åke W. Sjöberg and
Erle V. Leichty
For making this all possible


INTRODUCTION

I first learned how to photograph tablets in the Wellesley College basement workshop of the late Professor Ernest R. Lacheman in the fall of 1968. It was he who taught me how to apply my photographic skills to record tablets and to utilize ammonium chloride to enhance the clarity of these texts. During the five years I was a research associate in the Babylonian Section of the University Museum in Philadelphia (1969-1974) I used this method to photograph hundreds of tablets for NATN on which I was working as well as those of my colleagues at the University Museum and visiting scholars. From that time forward I have been publishing tablets in various university, museum and private collections throughout the United States. In the course of this work, I photographed hundreds, perhaps over a thousand tablets. But few of the photos were prepared with publication in mind since, at the time, it would have been prohibitively expensive to publish large numbers of photographs. My photos were made for record purposes, to facilitate collation, and only occasionally for publication; hence their varied quality. At times I have been asked for copies of photos of specific texts that I had published in order to facilitate the research of others. During the years I spent at University Museum I photographed numerous Sumerian literary texts subsequently published by Professor Åke W. Sjöberg and a number of other scholars. In 1991, Elizabeth C. Stone and I published Adoption in Old Babylonian Nippur and the Archive of Mannum-mešu-lissur in which the Cornell tablets were published utilizing the same system. In time I realized that the corpus of photos I had accumulated might provide a valuable resource for those interested in the study of scribal hands or simply to check tablets against published copies without having to examine the original texts. I also recognized that the reproduction of these photos, via the digital medium, was generally superior to most previous and current print publications. My participation in the CDLi project at UCLA encouraged me to archive my photos so that they might be made available over the Internet or otherwise disseminated via CD or DVD. It so happened that my son, Ethan, was available to prepare a web site, scan all my negatives and to create the files with which the photos could be distributed. Grants from the Rosen Family Foundation and the Occasional Publication Fund of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, facilitated the work.

Nearly all of the tablets were prepared for the photographs by coating them with ammonium chloride in the technique that I first described in my, The John Frederick Lewis Collection 1 (MVN 3 [1974]), p. 14. While photographs made this way allow for superior reproduction in publications, the method has not been used widely but most notably in the publications of the G. Cameron's Persepolis Treasury Tablets, the Uruk tablets published by A. Falkenstein, some Old Assyrian tablets published by K. Balkan, the recently published Mari tablets (a technique employed now by J.-M. Durand and the Mari équipe as signaled in AEM 1/1 [1988], p. x) and most recently on the Beydar pre-Sargonic tablets (Subartu 2, 1996). However, when viewing such photos on a computer screen, one can see how much clearer they can be. With the help of widely available software, the photos can be enlarged, sharpened and otherwise modified to enhance the clarity of the images and even individual signs. Furthermore, the digitalization of original negatives provides an economical way to preserve and especially to disseminate photos at minimum cost. It is hoped that by demonstrating the viability of providing a large corpus of original tablet photos, it might encourage other scholars and institutions to do likewise with their respective archives. In the meantime, the CDLi project has taken the lead.

Dr. Bendt Alster (Copenhagen) has contributed an additional collection of photos that he made of tablets and casts at the University Museum and elsewhere as part of his publication of Proverbs of Ancient Sumer 1-2 (1997). The quality of a number of these photos is less than desired but, in any case, they may prove of use. In this way, he too is disseminating his photo collection, many of which could not be included in the published volumes, as widely as possible. He also provided photos of unpublished texts, many of which will be edited in his forthcoming publications. His photos are indentified as such in the notes to the respective texts.

We have tried to make this site as user friendly as possible. One may sort the texts by genre, language, publication number, museum number, etc. In addition, transliterations, many of which were provided by Remco de Maaijer, and copies are provided for all of the NATN texts and FLP texts. The contents will be updated periodically as additions and corrections to the data are made. Suggestions for improvements will be most appreciated and may be sent to me at dio1@cornell.edu.

I am very grateful to Jonathan P. Rosen (New York City) who provided financial support through the Rosen Family Foundation together with the Occasional Publication Fund of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University. I would also like to thank Remco de Maaijer for sending his file of NATN transliterations and Professor Steve Tinney of the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project, University Museum, Philadelphia, for his help with the identification of some of the literary texts whose museum numbers were lost since I made the photos. But most of all I owe thanks to my son, Ethan K. Owen, for sharing his invaluable computer skills and especially for the many hours he expended to create this web site and to archive this corpus in order to make it available to the scholarly community.

Finally, this site is dedicated to Professors Åke W. Sjöberg and Erle V. Leichty. They epitomize the openness that continues to characterize the Babylonian Section of the University Museum. Not only did they provide me with my first opportunity to work on the magnificent Nippur collection, they also instilled in me the need for cooperation and collection accessibility and likewise they have provided many other Assyriologists, scholars and students alike, with similar access to the treasures in their charge. No other collection has allowed such unfettered access, the result of which has been the steady flow of dissertations and publications that originated in the Babylonian Section of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania.

David I. Owen
The Bernard and Jane Schapiro Professor of
Ancient Near Eastern and Judaic Studies
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
New Year's Day, 2003