Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection.

• Author: Beckman, Gary

Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection. Edited by AGNETE W. LASSEN, ECKART FRAHM, and KLAUS WAGENSONNER. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. xiii + 306. $35 (paper).

Although the ancient Near Eastern collections housed in the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are the best known in America, the single largest accumulation of cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals on this side of the Atlantic is the Yale Babylonian Collection (YBC) in New Haven, Connecticut, since 2017 affiliated with the Yale Peabody Museum. Familiar to scholars because of its vast holdings and numerous publications of the objects in its care, the YBC is hardly a tourist attraction, located as it has long been in a nonpublic area of the Sterling Memorial Library.

Seeking to remedy this relative obscurity, the current curatorial staff of the YBC has produced this sumptuous volume, presenting beautiful photographs (most taken by Klaus Wagensonner) of the highlights of the collection. These include the "Yale football" of Entemena of Lagash (Fig. 7.3), the Old Babylonian culinary tablets (Figs. 9.10-11), the "Yale Tablet" of the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Fig. 12.1), the Middle Assyrian An-Anum text (largest piece in the inventory, p. 232, no. 53), the gold and silver foundation tablets of Assurnasirpal II (p. 208, nos. 11-12), a manuscript of the Curse of Agade (Fig. 14.5), and many beautiful cylinder seals and their impressions in greatly enlarged format.

In addition to the sketch of the history of the collection beginning in 1911 (by Agnete Lassen...