Cuneiform Documents from the Chaldean and Persian Periods.

• Author: Pearce, Laurie E.

The collection of the World Heritage Museum of the University of Illinois (henceforth WHM) contains approximately 1750 cuneiform tablets, of which 113 texts from the Chaldean and Persian periods (using the author's terminology) are published in the present volume. It is noteworthy that the author has here incorporated two features not typical of cuneiform text publications.

First, Sack includes the correspondence conducted in the years 1913-18 between the antiquities dealer, Edgar J. Banks, and two individuals central to the creation of the WHM tablet collection: Professor Arthur S. Pease, then director of the WHM, and Edmund James, then president of the University of Illinois. The author notes that, in light of Dr. Banks' seminal role in the development of tablet collections in the United States, the correspondence is of interest for the history of Assyriology in the United States (p. 1). It informs us of Banks' methods of distributing tablets, statuary, and other objects he acquired from Mesopotamia. Sack considers Banks' financial situation before, during, and after World War I, and describes how Banks supported himself on the lecture circuit (pp. 6-8). This section concludes with a comment on the effect on archival unity resulting from the distribution of texts from single archives and sites to diverse museum locations. The author's comments, interspersed among the letters, make clear that Banks' methods of obtaining objects, while widely condemned today, were consistent with the practice of his times.

The second feature of note in this volume is that the texts are published in photograph, transliteration, and translation but without hand copies. Unfortunately, these photographs are no substitute for copies. The most serious shortcoming is that many of the photographs are difficult to read because of the distortion which results from transferring curved tablet surfaces onto flat, photographic images. Some lines cannot be read on the photograph at all; typically these are last lines of the obverse, where the angle of the clay, as it meets the lower edge, is so great that it is in a different focal plane from the rest of the obverse. Some attempt has been made to include photographs of edges, but this is inconsistently done, and the legends do not always clearly identify the edges as left, right, upper, or lower.

Placing photographs of one tablet on two or more plates makes the plates inconvenient to work with. The appearance of...