Cuneiform Collections in the Princeton University Library – Now on Display from Oct 2-8, 2012

Ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets with cuneiform writ­ing, dat­ing back over 4,000 years, will on dis­play in the Fire­stone Library’s Eighteenth-Century Win­dow from Octo­ber 2 to 8. Cuneiform writ­ing was a method of incis­ing script into wet clay with a wedge-shaped writ­ing imple­ment. For nearly 3,000 years, the scribes of Mesopotamia mas­tered the ver­ti­cal, hor­i­zon­tal, and oblique strokes nec­es­sary to write words and num­bers in Sumer­ian, Baby­lon­ian, Assyr­ian, and other lan­guages of the ancient Near East. The Man­u­scripts Divi­sion has a sub­stan­tial cuneiform col­lec­tion of approx­i­mately 1,350 baked and unbaked clay tablets and tablet cases, as well as some clay cylin­ders and nail-shaped cones.  Continue

 

No. 665. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

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