Category: Image, Middle East, New York

Introduction Cornell University has a number of  collections of cuneiform tablets, donated to the university over the past century. These tablets are made of clay and inscribed with signs that modern scholars call cuneiform ("wedge or cone shaped"). They come from an area that is called Mesopotamia, which today roughly equals the territory of modern Iraq. These written documents date from the beginnings of writing, ca. 3350 B.C.E. until the end of the cuneiform tradition, sometime towards the end of the second century C.E. The largest collection of cuneiform tablets at Cornell is housed in the Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Seminar in the  Department of Near Eastern Studies (NES) and currently consists of ca.