Collection Of Proverbs Research Articles

Some Interlinguistic Relationships in the First Hungarian Proverb Collection of 1598

Following a short historical introduction, referring to more than a thousand Hungarian students studying at Wittenberg and other universities in the 16th century, the article presents proverbs included in the first 1598 Hun- garian collection, which was compiled by the Strasburg graduate schoolmaster Janos Baranyai Decsi and was based on the 1574 edition of Adagiorum Chiliades by Erasmus, and others. includes universal proverbs like What isn't good for you, isn't good for others, European loan proverbs originating in the Greek clas- sics, like To keep a snake in the bosom (Aesop), from Roman classics, like To carry wood to the forest (Horace), Cobbler do not go beyond your last (Pliny the Elder), Go slowly, you arrive (Suetonius), proverbs from the Bible He digs a pit for others and falls in himself (Proverbs 26: 27) - You see a splinter in another's eye, but fail to see a beam in your own (Matthew 7: 3). From Medieval Latin there is, for example, One need not inspect the tooth of a gift horse, Where a pig is offered, be there with your bag, Where there are three women, there is a market. are also some Hungarian variants of European proverbs. Regional and sub-regional proverbs include those having Nordic (Slavonic, Baltic) affiliations, like Peel the lime tree until it peels. A cheap meat has a dilute broth has Northern and Southern Slavonic, Baltic and Turkish equivalents (meat is replaced by fish in Estonian, Finnish, Zyryan and Ukrainian), One stone is enough (to frighten) one thousand crows can be found in Bulgarian, Turkish and Persian. One sitting among the reeds can make a whistle of his choice and It does (not) bring much to the kitchen have earlier exact German equivalents, while A liar is caught sooner than a lame man is found in different Romance languages. are a number of proverbs found only in Hungarian, like The pepper is small but 'strong', A Szekely picks up anything of more value than a louse, He that wants to shoot a crow, does not bang his bow, There is no packed hay-cart unable to carry one more forkful of hay, etc.

Ophthalmology in proverbs and aphorisms

After a comprehensive review of available texts and literature covering five millennia, the authors present a collection of ophthalmic proverbs and aphorisms with an examination of their applicability within current medical knowledge. A total of 74 ophthalmic proverbs and aphorisms were retrieved from 130 texts and divided into seven categories: (i) importance of vision ('The eyes, like sentinels, hold the highest place in the body'); (ii) definition of blindness and anatomical observations ('The eye is protected by the lashes, eyebrows, and orbit'); (iii) diseases of the eye such as presbyopia, sensitivity to light and dry eye ('Tear in the eye is jewel'); (iv) the eye as a window of the body; (v) vulnerability of the eye ('The eye cannot oppose an awl'); (vi) health behaviours and protection of sight ('Be gentle with two: women and eyes'), and finally; and (vii) nutrition and vision ('Carrots improve vision'). The majority of these proverbs and aphorisms can be used as a guide, not for prognosis, diagnosis or cure, but rather for ocular health promotion.

The Sumerian proverb collections

Nous connaissons actuellement plus de 2000 proverbes sumériens de l'époque paléobabylonienne. Cet article réexamine notre compréhension du corpus. Que sont les proverbes? Que sont les collections dans lesquelles ils étaient rassemblés ? Qui les utilisait et dans quel but ? Nous conclurons cet article par quelques textes inédits et nous proposerons également quelques révisions aux translittérations et traductions existantes.

La famille et l'éducation des enfants d'après les recueils manuscrits de proverbes russes du XVIIe siècle

Семья, дети, их воспитание по русским рукописным пословицам XVII века Представленный в статье паремиологический материал дает представление об отношении трудового народа России XVII-XVIII веков к семье, детям, воспитанию, обучению. Целью исследования была реконструкция народных этических и народных педагогических воззрений в период, когда за столетие резко изменилось содержание духовной жизни общества (от Московского царства XVII века к Российской империи XVIII-oro, ставшей частью европейского культурного пространства), как возникали новые оценки внутрисемейных отношений, межличностных индивидуальных связей, любви, женщины, детей, близких.

Les proverbes russes : statut et étude

Русские пословицы: статус и изучение В статье определяется сущность и статус пословицы как самобытного феномена словесной культуры: ее принципиальные, важнейшие семантические, темпоральные, структурные и др. параметры в сравнении с единицами обычной речи и авторскими афоризмами. Рассматривается характер и диапазон изменения ее формы и содержания. Очерчиваются границы, разделяющие пословицы и квазипословичные формулы (поговорки, авторские афоризмы), как и то, что их объединяет. Обозначены основные этапы собирания русских пословиц и этапы становления русской паремиологии в качестве отдельной отрасли филологического знания.

The Didactic Power of Metaphor in the Aphoristic Sayings of Proverbs

Many proverbial sayings make significant use of metaphor not simply to enhance their rhetorical appeal but to convey essential meaning. By examining aphorisms that refer to human discourse, this article argues that a cognitive approach to metaphor not only sheds light on the didactic power of aphorisms, but also opens new avenues of intertextual analysis among the various sayings and collections of Proverbs. Such an approach highlights, for example, the differing metaphorical schemas employed by the socalled Solomonic and Hezekian collections.

:Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century

are collections of quotations, anecdotes, proverbs, and various other types of text extracts. They and the theories informing their compilation were the progenitors of reference works that are now taken quite for granted: encyclopedias, concordances, and books of quotations. Commonplace Books is a stand-alone historical survey of manuscript and printed books relating to the complex and extremely influential genre of the commonplace book from classical antiquity to the present day. Comprised of a series of long historical essays followed by short hand-lists of exhibited items, this volume is the first comprehensive, introductory survey to cover the entire commonplace book tradition, from its origin in ancient Greek and Roman rhetorical theory and philosphy, to the end of the twentieth century.

Like Grapes of Gold Set in Silver: An Interpretation of Proverbial Clusters in Proverbs 10:1-22:16 (review)

Hebrew Studies 44 (2003) 267 Reviews Ismel, which gave rise to respective songs. Are we able to state more concretely the celebrations, motives, or moods of our biblical forbears when they took to feasting and singing psalms? Do we know about their religious rituals, small or large, which gave expression to common exuberance? And how do our opportunities in real life as well as in liturgical context to render thanks, give offerings, and jubilate in the presence of the Lord differ and coincide with the psalmist's situations? If we start out with such an admirably contextual and cotextual model of interpretation I would expect in each treatise, short as it may be, some indication of possible avenues towards the concrete analogous flesh-and-bone-realities of our world. Nevertheless, the author has taken some first steps in that desirable direction. He has accumulated a great wealth of infonnation along that line, how initially poet and orall1e, redactor and community worked together to mold, use and transmit that unfathomable treasure of the biblical Psalter. Konrad Schaefer is to be credited with many valuable insights and rich liturgical experiences in psalm adaptation. He leaves it, as we may say, to the modem reader, meditator, and supplicant to concretize his own encounters with the World and God and synthesize into the old poems his or her own daily experience. Erhard S. Gerstenberger University ofMarbllrg D-35394 Giessell, Germany gerster/z@sta!f.uni-marbllrg.de LIKE GRAPES OF GOLD SET IN SILVER: AN INTERPRETATION OF PROVERBIAL CLUSTERS IN PROVERBS 10:1-22:16. By Knut Martin Heim. BZAW 273. Pp. xiv + 378. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001. Cloth, $108.90. Heim seeks to show that the proverbs in Prov 10:1-22: 16 are organized in groupings he calls "clusters," and further, that these provide the context for understanding of the individual proverbs in their collected fonn. He makes the following claims "with contidence" (p. 315): I. The position of (most) sayings in their present sequence is the result of conscious arrangements. 2. This deliberate design was created in order to combine successive sayings into groups. 3. Although links between consecutive unite; are significant, such clusters should be kept distinct from one another. Hebrew Studies 44 (2003) 268 Reviews 4. The (small) units are the contextual backdrop against which the individual sayings should be understood. 5. Taken together, these units mean more than the sum of the individual parts. The book begins with a valuable survey of scholarly ideas about the organization of sayings in the proverb collections. Heim divides these views into two categories, "Denial of Coherent Groupings" (chap. I) and "Affinnation of Coherent Groupings" (chap. 3). Heim seeks to explain the Denial on the grounds that its advocates were "generally guided by particular interests in tension with an appreciation of the literary shape of Proverbs 10: 1-22:16" (p. 6), in particular concern for literary history and oral use. This assumes what is to be proven, that there is a "literary shape" that one should appreciate, so that any "denial" of this truth calls for an explanation. Anyway, it turns out that Wm. McKane (Proverbs rOTL; London: SCM, 1970]) and C. Westennann (Fonngeschichte ZJlr Weisheitsliteratur 1950-1990 [Stuttgart: Calwer, 1991] and other works) did not deny editorial groupings so much as "neglect" them (pp. 10, 14). (In discussing the latter, Heim makes the important observation that African proverbs cannot be assumed to exemplify the way biblical proverbs were used before incorporation in collections because "most comparisons of biblical and modem •pre-literate' material so far have been based on proverbs in the writtell fonn of the collections by modem anthropologists" [po 15]). Coming to the Affmners, Heim does not search for motives to explain their ideas but evaluates them as theories in their own right. His critiques are insightful. Particularly valuable is his lengthy assessment of R. Scoralick's E;flzelspruch ulld Sammlung: Komposition ;m Buch der Sprichwiirter Kapitel 10-15 (BZAW 232; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995) (Heim, pp. 51-59). Heim points out problems common to many attempts to fmd organized proverbial structures. Quite to the point is his observation that "[c]orespondences between individual sayings, due...

<i>Los Refranes o Proverbios en Romance</i> (1555), de Hernán Núñez, Pinciano

The work tries to consider «Refranes o proverbios en romance» by Hernan Nunez, the Greek Commander, a peculiar work that appears in an important moment of the Spanish history and literature. It is also remarkable for being a posthumuous work because his author did not want to publish it in life or to leave it unknown. The study focus on the peculiarities of all type, from the purely linguistic ones to those which have to do with the literature, without forgetting the circunstances of the author and the relationships that this collection of proverbs has with other previous and later ones (Valles, Mal Lara, Correas), Spanish and foreigners. The work genesis, its originalilty and repercussion..., and the editions from the first to the last one (2001 ) are also studied. Hernan Nunez, Professor at Salamanca University, prestigious philologist at his time, publisher and translator of classical editions, decides to make a collection of proverbs at the end of his life, the most plentiful ever known. So that he does not mind using any procedure to get the proverbs: from buying them to his students to going to other compilations, hand-written or in progress. His relationship with the Erasmism and humanists of the age are shown in these pages which include clearly irreverent, anticlerical and scatological proverbs that shocked later writers.

„Nem jobb Ő is a Deákné vásznánál” A Hungarian fiddler’s song before 1580

There is probably only one idiomatic phrase in the proverb collection by Janos Baranyai Decsi that doubtless originates in contemporary everyday Hungarian language and the 16th century literary background of which can be clearly identified. The phrase Nem jobb o is a deakne vasznanal ( Not a whit better than anybody else ) has always been popular since the 16th century. The funny, sarcastic poem ( The cloth of the famous deakne, written before 1580) recounts the fatal marriage of a certain Mate deak - partly in the form of dialogue. This poem is one of the oldest Hungarian women mocking songs within the genre of wedding songs. It demonstrates all the characteristics of the old Hungarian trufa genre: it can be performed as a farce, the joke has its cream and it is based on mummery and pretence: it provides a parody of a well-known human type. It is possible that this trufa was a stock play of contemporary popular tricksters and jugglers. It mocked the wife of Mate deak who was lazy to weave .

Slovene Proverbs through the Time

The paper focuses on Slovene researchers' interest in Slovene proverbs from the Sl o- vene Protestantism (about 1550) to the present time. The first proverbs are found in the written form already with the founder of the Slovene written language Primož Trubar. It was the gramma r- ian Adam Bohoric , who first systematically included the proverbs in the first Slovene grammar book in 1568. The first collection of Slovene proverbs was prepared by Janez Mihelic , but it was lost a l- ready at the end of the 18th century. In the second half of the 19th century a lot of cultural workers collected Slovene proverbs at the same time as the words for The Dictionary of Slovene Language. But only Fran Kocbek published proverbs in a separate book in 1887. In the first half of the 20th century the most productive collector was Josip Saselj, who in 1934 added his own material to Ko c- bek's collection. In the second half of the 20th century three publications were published by Stanko Prek (1972), Marija Makarovic (1973) and Etbin Bojc (1974), the latter being the most important. The Institute of Slovene Ethnology is preparing a new up-dated publication. Unfortunately Slovene researchers have not yet dealt with this subject matter thoroughly.

Die erste mehrsprachige Sprichwötersammlung mit einem niederälandischen Teil

The First Multilingual Collection of Proverbs with a Dutch Part. – Paroemiologia polyglottos (Graz 1592) by Hieronymus Megiser is the first multilingual collection of proverbs which has also 220 Dutch proverbs. They were taken mostly from the anonymous Proverbia communia (Deventer ca. 1480) and from Les proverbes anciens Flamengs et Francois (Antwerpen 1568) by Francois Goedthals. The proverbs fall into three groups. Among them there are proverbs which have the same or similar form as they have in contemporary Dutch (group 1). There are also proverbs which in contemporary Dutch are partially different in form (group 2). Most conspicuous are those, however, which are not known today (group 3).

János Baranyai Decsi and his adagia

The oldest extant Hungarian proverb collection – one of the first ones in East-Central Europe – can be found in the Adagiorum Graecolatinoungaricorum Chiliades quinque published in Bartfa in 1598. It was based on a 1574 Basel edition of the Adagiorum Chiliades by Erasmus, including collections of Gilbert Cousin and others, too. The 4827 Hungarian entries of the Adagia include about 900 proverbs, part of them in common use today, others known in certain regions while some fell into oblivion. About 100 of them can be found in about 30 books (e.g. Fables of Aesop by G. Heltai) and letters of earlier date. The author, Janos Baranyai Decsi, headmaster of the Szekelyvasarhely school and graduate of the Strasbourg Academy also wrote a travel description, a book of comparative law, poems in Latin and Greek, translated Sallust into Hungarian, wrote on Hungarian runic writing, the history of his time (he died in 1601) survived in manuscript form.

Robert Shipboy MacAdam (1808-95) His Life and Gaelic Proverb Collection

Robert Shipboy MacAdam (1808-95) His Life and Gaelic Proverb Collection

Nuevos textos sapienciales griegos en obras árabe-castellanas

A substantial part of Wisdom Literature texts translated to Castilian by the order of King Alfonso X come from Greek originals: that is certified by the Arab translators of Libro de los Buenos Proverbios (Hunayn) and Poridat de Poridades (ibn Batrik); and two other books, Bocados de Oro and Historia de la donzella Teodor , show the same characteristics. This paper is a first attempt to reconstruct, as fully as possible, the Greek models, as well as to trace their evolution from the 4th century B.C. to the 7th/8th A.D., when the books came to Arabs, directly or through Syriac translations. –– Despite some Arab touch, these works are essentially the Greek texts of the Roman Imperial period, slightly modified by the Byzantine who added religious and palatine allusions, as well as Christian proverbs. Contents and form are coincident with the antique Wisdom Literature as far as we can know it, specially from the Lifes followed by collections of proverbs, and from the literature about Alexander the Great and Aristotle.

Proverb-Antiproverb: Wolfgang Mieder's Paremiological Approach

Wolfgang Mieder's scholarly activities can be divided into two major projects. On the one hand his work encompasses a multitude of detailed studies in the field of proverbs and sayings, and on the other it is marked by the endeavor to develop an overall framework for this research area. In doing so, Mieder often went well beyond the traditional borders of linguistics and extended his research into the field of cultural studies. Consequently Mieder combines the search for paremiological principles with the analysis of all aspects of individual structures. The basic groundwork of the approach is witnessed by his German publications such as Ergebnisse der Sprichworterforschung (Results in the Research of Proverbs, 1978), Deutsche Sprichworter and Redensarten (German Proverbs and Sayings, 1979), and Sprichwort, Redensart, Zitat (Proverb, Saying and Quotation, 1985). Mention must also be made of his research into the history of the paremiological discipline, as exemplified by his anthology Deutsche Sprichworterforschung des 19. Jahrhunderts (German research into Proverbs in the 19th Century, 1984). In the United States too, essential works have been published. An outstanding study is Proverbs in Nazi Germany: The promulgation of Anti-Semitism and Stereotypes through Folklore (Journal of American Folk lore 95, 1982). In this work the author draws our attention to the methods which were used by the Nazi propaganda to take advantage of folklorist language. This study has recently been supplemented by a collection of essays entitled The Holocaust: Introductory Essays, which Wolfgang Mieder edited together with David Scrase (The University of Vermont, 1996). The book not only describes the history of the liquidation of the Jewish people but also shows ist repercussions on language, literature and philosophy. However, Mieder has not confined his scope to the German proverb. He has also considered the paremiological issue in the United States. Among the comprehensive studies published by Mieder are American Proverbs. A Study of Texts and Contexts (Bern 1989) which discusses the use of proverbs as it is typical in the United States, and Proverbs of the Native Americans: A Prize Competition (Western Folklore 48, 1989). Here the author shows that proverbs were not unknown to the native population of the American continent. Finally, mention should be made of the collections of proverbs which Mieder dedicated to the country he adopted many years ago: Vermont. Talk less and say more: Vermont Proverbs (Shellburne, 1986) and As Sweet as Apple Cider: Vermont Expressions (Shellburne, 1988) introduce us to the people's wisdom of Vermont. The climax of this strand of his work is certainly embodied by The Dictionary of American Proverbs (sew York 1992, 1996 paperback), which Mieder completed in cooperation with Stewart A. Kingsbury and Kelsie B. Harder. The dictionary contains thousands of proverbs which previously were only partly known in written language. The proverbs were collected during thirty years of fieldwork, carried out by the American Dialect Society By virtue of the references, variants and geographical specifications it provides, the dictionary has become a standard work in the field of American language and culture. As he pursued his project, Mieder soon became aware of the usefulness and necessity of bibliographical records, not only of published collections of proverbs, but also of the scientific literature in the field. This enterprise was not restricted to certain particular languages such as English or German, but was instead to comprise all languages which possess printed evidence of their proverbial wisdom. Mieder began very early to put such bibliographies together. His first production within an international framework is entitled International Proverb Scholarship. An Annotated Bibliography and was published by the New York-based publisher Garland in 1982. The Bibliography contains references to 2 100 studies published over the past 200 years, and includes a critical commentary. …

My Summer with Archer, and Some Unfinished Business. The 1999 Archer Taylor Memorial Lecture

Summer with Archer, and Some Unfinished Business* The 1999 Taylor Memorial Lecture I wonder how many in this audience were fortunate enough to have had a folklore class with Taylor, the scholar whose life and work we honor with this lecture series. I did have that opportunity some forty years ago, and I decided to make My Summer with Archer the subject of my talk (instead of the original topic I had in mind, `Archer Taylor and the Urban Legend). Let me take you back in my memory and your imaginations to Bloomington, Indiana, the summer of 1958, during the fifth and last session of the Folklore Institute of America before that institute became a permanent fixture on the Indiana University campus instead of a special event convened every second summer since 1950. An extraordinary group of fulltime folklore faculty and visiting lecturers were on campus that summer, and, as it turns out, the students were pretty remarkable as well. Just the autumn before, Richard M. Dorson had become chairman of the Folklore Program at IU, replacing Stith Thompson, who founded the program. I also arrived at IU in Fall 1957 after a Fulbright year in Norway; I had just changed my major from English to Folklore, and I was eager to add some credits to my skimpy record of folklore classes. The summer institute full-time faculty consisted of Professors Dorson, Warren Roberts, Edson Richmond and two visitors, Katharine Luomala from the University of Hawaii and Taylor who had just retired from the University of California, Berkeley. I took one class from each of the visitors, plus Dorson's International Relations seminar which featured visiting speakers from around the world. The brochure for the summer institute lists as visitors Stith Thompson, who had retired the year before, and twenty other notables including Ernest Baughman, Austin and Alta Fife, Melville Herskovits, Thelma James, William Jansen, Louis Jones, Vance Randolph, Charles Seeger, and D. K Wilgus; it was a veritable who's who of famous folklorists of the time. I have no idea what it cost the university to bring in these speakers as well as Luc Lacourciere from Quebec, plus a Japanese and a Polish scholar who were on visiting professorships elsewhere in the United States, but it appears that the student fees for the session could hardly have paid the bills. The brochure specifies tuition for students desiring University credit at $9.00 per credit hour while non-credit students and auditors paid $3.00. Another perk was that No charge [was] made for visitors to the Institute for a period of ten days or less, nor for auditors who already have a Ph.D. degree. In line with these modest fees, the brochure indicates that housing was available in University Halls of Residence at costs ranging from $167.50 to $210 for the entire session, meals included! It was also mentioned in the institute brochure that Taylor was past president of the Modern Language Association (1951) and author of The Proverb ( 1931) and of English Riddles from Oral Tradition (1951). Unmentioned were the facts that he had been president of the American Folklore Society in 1935-36 and editor of the Journal of American Folklore in 1941. To put this in some perspective, Taylor had published his classic book on proverbs two years before I was born; he was president of AFS when I was two years old, and he was MLA president the year I entered college. In the summer of 1958, Taylor turned 68 years old, and I was just 25. The class I took from Taylor that summer was a graduate course in the proverb and the riddle, thus described: The varieties of traditional gnomic and enigmatic expression with special reference to their origins, dissemination, stylistic peculiarities, and uses in social situations and literature. Students will be urged to make a collection of proverbs used by an Indiana writer and to investigate a particular text with regard to one of these aspects. …

Robert Shipboy MacAdam: His Life and Gaelic Proverb Collection

Robert Shipboy MacAdam: His Life and Gaelic Proverb Collection

Authority in Middle English Proverb Literature

Proverbs are one method by which an ideology can be taught. They are pithy, memorable phrases and sentences that encapsulate guidance for behaviour in ethical situations or a particular view of the way the world functions or ought to function. If an individual saying becomes proverbial, it becomes part of the "common sense" and ideology of the culture in which it is used, a means by which people can be made to behave and perceive according to verbal reflexes, without recourse to thought (Cram 90-92). But if any piece of language is to affect the way people think and behave, it has to have authority. Folk proverbs carry their own authority within themselves. They do not need a source attribution for their validity; if everyone in the speech community recognises them as 'proverbial,' then the tradition behind them in itself gives them authority. Political and religious institutions, especially authoritarian ones, have long been aware of the power of the proverb to influence behaviour. In the medieval church, this acknowledgment sometimes took the form of the collection of popular proverbs by the clergy for the use of all, and at other times was manifested in the use of vernacular proverbs in the text of Latin sermons (Wenzel 80). But another possible reaction is to create new 'proverbs' which are more conducive to the ideology of the institution, in contrast to the undependable and sometimes ambiguous morality of folk proverbs, either by composing them or by finding them in written sources. Dictators like Mao Zedong have attempted to proverbialise their own sayings, which the populace is forcibly taught to mouth and bear in mind, so that it will behave and perceive in ways that are acceptable to authority. There is evidence that the English church also attempted to create its own body of proverbs during the Middle English period, for a substantial body of literature survives from that time which consists of lists of proverbial advice. Much of this literature appears to be an attempt to make use of the concept of the proverb, which had an oral tradition that went back to pre-literate, and pre-Christian times, but in a way more reliably conducive to a world-view and behaviour consistent with Christian dogma. These sayings were not really proverbial in the traditional sense, but more like direct, straight-forward instruction or advice. However, they seem nevertheless to have been regarded as 'proverbs' at the time, whether they originated with the church or not (Louis). In any case, because the new proverbs lacked the automatic authority of popular proverbs, they had to be framed in contexts which attempted to substitute a different kind of moral authority for the 'proverbial' utterances. These legitimising contexts were basically three: the domestic circumstance of a parent instructing a child; the more public situation of a ruler or philosopher instructing the people; and florilegia-like collections in which numerous utterances are attributed to various figures of history.

Tablets from the Sippar Library. VII. Three Wisdom Texts

The present article in the series begun in Iraq 52 and continued in Volumes 56–8 offers three tablets from the Sippar library which add to our knowledge of the genre of Babylonian literature known today as “wisdom”: a manuscript of Tablet I of Ludlul bēl nēmeqi (The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer), a copy of the great Samas Hymn, and a tablet inscribed with a small collection of proverbs. Since W. G. Lambert's edition of Ludlul in Babylonian Wisdom Literature several further sources for Tablet I of this text have been identified. Most notable of these is the manuscript from Nimrud, which plugged the gap between lines 12 and 41 and partly filled out the fragmentary end of the text. Being complete save for a few lines either side of its bottom edge, the new Sippar tablet provides further improvements in both places. It contains 11. 1–50 on its obverse and 62–120 on its reverse. The scribe failed to judge his spacing accurately, with the result that towards the end of the tablet he was forced to double up a whole sequence of lines, the twelve lines 105–16 occupying only six lines on the tablet. But even this was not enough, and 11. 117–20 and the catchline (=II 1) had to be written on the top edge of the tablet. Unfortunately this left no room for a colophon, unless one is inscribed on the left edge. For the moment we are unable to ascertain whether this might be so. The tablet came from Niche 1 D of the library — that is the fourth from the ground in the row furthest left on the south-east wall; it measures 14.7 × 7.5 × 3.1 cm.