Cuneiform Inscriptions in the Collections of the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester

Abstract

The collection of the cuneiform documents in the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, was mainly acquired between 1903 and 1923 by Professors H. W. Hogg and Canon C. H. W. Johns; these texts form the nucleus of the collection. In addition, most of the six hundred tablets in the Rev. C. L. Bedale's private collection were presented to the Library by his wife in 1919, and six more by his son, Mr Paul Bedale, and daughter in 1979. Bedale described a number of his Umma tablets for a Library publication between 1901 and 1905. A selection of these texts was published by him in 1915.Many of the Sumerian texts, in all 884 tablets, were catalogued and published by T. Fish in 1932. Further tablets, letters of Old Babylonian date, were studied and published by him in 1936. Other tablets were also published by Fish, in Manchester Cuneiform Studies and elsewhere. More Old Babylonian tablets were studied by the late Douglas Kennedy, some of which were given numbers following on from those published by Fish. F. R. Kraus's edition of the Library's Old Babylonian letters, which appeared in 1985, included these as well as Fish's letters, and a few more unpublished letters that had not been assigned numbers in the Library's running sequence. In 1973 Claus Wilcke published most of the Sumerian literary texts, and J. N. Postgate published three of the Assyrian tablets. At that time these were also without JRL numbers.