The Cuneiform Tablets at Syracuse University

Among its rare book collections, the George Arents Research Library at Syracuse University has 489 clay tablets written 4000 years ago. All of these cuneiform tablets, composed in the Sumerian language, are accounting records. Although how the library came to have them is not documented, they seem to have been in the collection for at least a halfcentury, awaiting their rediscovery by Professor David I. Owen, chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. The tablets are being deciphered and copied by the present author, who will publish his work. These tablets were made in the city of Umma in the heart of the Tigris and Euphrates Valley, called Mesopotamia (between rivers) by the Greeks