Cuneiform Tablet, part of the corner stone of the palace at Kalakh (Nimrud)

Inscriptions

"(A palace of cedar, a palace of cyrpress, a palace of juniper, a palace of boxwood, a palace of mulberry, a pal)ace of pistachio-wood and tamarisk for my royal dwelling (and for my lordly pleasure for all time I founded it. Beasts of the mountains and of the se)as, of white limestone and alabaster I fashioned; I set them up in its gates. (I adorned it, I made it glorious, and put around it fastening bars of bronze. Doors of ce)dar, cypress, juniper, and mulberry I hung in its gates; and silver, gold, (lead, copper, and iron, the spoil of my hands form the lands which I had brought under my rule, in great quantities I to)ok and placed in it." Ferris J. Stephens (The words in parenthesis in my translation do not appear in this fragment, they are in the example of the complete inscription in Yale's collection)

Course History

REL 81, Dickinson Distinguished Scholar Seminar: Orientalism and the Origins of Religion, Susannah Heschel, Fall 2012

ANTH 12.2, The Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, Jason Herrmann, Spring 2013

Exhibition History

Critical Faculties: Teaching with the Hood's Collections, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 15-March 13, 2005.

Provenance

Collected by the missionary Dr. Henry John Lobdell (1827-1855), about 1852; to his mother, Almina Meeker Lobdell (1805-1891), Brookfield, Connectuicut, about 1855; to her pastor, Bishop Daniel Ayres Goodsell (1840-1909), Washington, Connecticut; to Alice Lyman Goodrich (1877-1971) [Mrs. Nathaniel Lewis Goodrich], Hanover, New Hampshire; given to present collection, 1952.

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Subjects