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~ News from the Rare Books Department of Special Collections at the J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah

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Search results for: scott beadles

We recommend — Book as Archive & Enclosure

04 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Recommended Workshop

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accordion, Alicia Bailey, Aurora, Book Arts Studio, butterflies, Chester A. Reed, collage, Colorado, copper foil, Denver, drop-spine box, envelopes, handwritten, Hedi Kyle, J. Willard Marriott Library, mica, moths, Penrose Special Collections, photographs, rare books, Ravenpress, Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers, Ruth Wheeler, seed, thread, tyvek, University of Denver


“…the continued existence of these birds in the form of skins, specimens and eggs at museums worldwide is perhaps indicative of a human tendency to preserve remains rather than…to protect life. I also considered that both impulses are as much a part of contemporary endeavor as statistic gathering.”

Extinct Extant
Alicia Bailey
Aurora, CO: Ravenpress, 2013
N7433.4 B265 E98 2013

From the artist’s statement: “Photographs of birds digitally printed, envelopes are hand printed, labels and spine text laser etched. Book based on an enhanced accordion binding structure designed by Hedi Kyle.” Issued in a drop-spine box with paper title label attached to the top and colophon attached to the bottom inside. Envelopes are attached to an accordion spine, forming eight leaves. The first envelope contains the preface and bibliographic information. The remaining seven envelopes contain single folios printed with information about an extinct species of bird, with a photograph of a specimen of that species laid in. A cropped image of each species is collaged to the back of each envelope. The name of each species is laser etched to the spine and back side of each envelope. Each envelope is a repurposed commercial negative envelope. Edition of eighteen copies plus two artist’s proofs, signed and numbered by the artist. Rare Books copy is no. 13.


Book as Archive & Enclosure
Alicia Bailey

Cosponsored by the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers and the Book Arts Program

October 26 & 27
Friday & Saturday, 10:00 – 5:00
Book Arts Studio, J. Willard Marriott Library

$185, register here

Alicia Bailey has developed various ways of adapting traditional binding and structures to create books designed to hold dimensional objects. In this workshop, participants create two books to showcase and house both dimensional objects and flat artifacts. With great flexibility at the spine and sturdy, rigid pages, these books work well when handled or displayed as traditional book forms or as sculptural objects. Bring personal images and artifacts to build enclosures that are sculptural narratives or archives of memory.

Alicia Bailey is a studio artist working across multiple disciplines. She has focused on book arts, box constructions and assemblage since the mid-nineties, producing artists’ books, sculptural books and limited-edition books that incorporate a broad range of methods and materials. She is particularly interested in box and bookworks that include elements beyond surface printed images and text; that move beyond traditional book forms and embrace presentation flexibility, innovative page folding tactics, rigid-page construction and use of alternative materials. Her work has been featured in dozens of solo and group exhibits throughout the world and is held in numerous public, private, and special collections. An archive of her work in the book arts is under development at Penrose Special Collections, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado.

Rare Books is pleased to support the Book Arts Program with its collections.



Animal Mineral vegetable Book #1
Alicia Bailey
Aurora, CO: A. Bailey, 2013
N7433.4 B22 A7 2013

Made with mica, copper foil, thread, tyvek with surface applied color, seed fluff, moths and butterflies.



Wildflower Identification
Alicia Bailey
Aurora, CO: Alicia Baileyu, 2013
N7433.4 B22 W5 2013

Texts from the handwritten notes of Ruth Wheeler. Photographs scanned from 1946 originals taken by Ruth Wheeler. Color reproductions from flower guide published in 1916 by Chester A. Reed.

— Photographs by Scott Beadles

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The Great War: Here and Over There, 1914-1918: A Digital Exhibition

18 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Online Exhibitions

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exhibition, Special Collections Gallery, World War I

This digital exhibition is based on a physical exhibition in the Special Collections Gallery on display between October 10 and December 07, 2014, marking the beginning of what was referred to by contemporaries as “The Great War.” This coming November 11 marks the anniversary of the end of WWI, one hundred years ago.

The digital exhibition was created by Jon Bingham with help from Scott Beadles. We take this opportunity to say goodbye to Jon, who is moving on to greener pastures under the wild blue yonder, and wish him our very best in his new adventures. Thank you, Jon, for your great work in Rare Books.

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Boards: A-Book-Part-You-Never-Think-About-But-Is-Super-Important-Anyway

30 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by scott beadles in Uncategorized

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Antoine Augereau, barf board, Benjamin Eliot, boards, book, bookbinders, bookmaking, Boston, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Colonial America, conservators, Coptic, delaminate, Deseret News, exhibition, felts, fibers, fore-edge, Jim Croft, Jonathan Sandberg, medullary ray, Old Ways of Making Books, paper, paper mill, papermaking, Paris, pasteboard, rare book collections, Samuel Willard, scabbard, scaleboard, Scott Beadles, screen, Simon de Colines, vat, vellum, water, waterleaf, wood, wooden boards, workshop

Judge a book by it’s cover all you want. That cover just keeps on doing what it does best: protecting the book’s text. Covers allows a book to continue to convey information by taking the wear and tear of everyday use. Through the years different materials have been used to cover books.



Coptic Binding
Uncatalogued

Wood. Early books were most commonly covered with wooden boards. Rare Books has several manuscripts with Coptic bindings. These books are well-used, with uncovered wooden boards that are polished by handling, but they are often broken and then repaired with linen thread. The wood is sometimes cut similarly to modern lumber, in a straight line across the log. In the picture below you can see the curve of the tree’s growth rings. Wood is porous and expands and contracts as it takes on or loses moisture from the air. It will expand unevenly around that natural curve, warping and sometimes even cracking the board. The strongest wood boards are cut in a very different way.

Imagine you are looking down on the round end of a log. If you cut this log radially from the center as if it was a pie, two useful things happen. First, boards cut like this (called a quarter cut) resist warping because the grain of the wood is running straight up your board, instead of curving through it. Looking at the boards from the top you see little to none of the curve of the tree’s rings. This board will warp very little as humidity changes. Second, there is a structural feature in wood called the medullary ray. These rays go through the wood from the core out to the bark. They are perpendicular to the main grain of the wood, forming a remarkably durable natural plywood. Many Coptic boards break because they are made with wood that does not have prominent medullary rays.

In the above image, notice the faint curve of the grain near the middle of the left board.

In the image below, we can see the medullary rays and the tree’s grain weaving together. The lighter lines are medullary rays, the darker lines are the tree’s grain creating a strong internal structure.


Handmade book
by Jonathan Sandberg from raw materials
at Jim Croft’s “Old Ways of Making Books” workshop



He kaine diatheke
Paris: [Antoine Augereau for] Simon de Colines, [29 November or 22 December] 1534
BS1965 1534

Pasteboard. All this picky woodwork added complications to the bookmaking process. When bookmakers discovered that they could just paste together paper proofs, misprints, or offcuts to make functional boards, it became common practice to do just that. This has made for interesting discoveries as modern conservators re-bind historical books and find that their boards are made of interesting or rare texts.



Deseret News
By Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Volume 6. March 1856-March 1866
Uncatalogued

Waterleaf. Around the mid-sixteenth century, very soon after pasteboard began to be used, another technique for making boards was developed. If you are familiar with historical papermaking, or you’ve seen our recent paper exhibition, Paper is Fundamental, you know that paper was made by drawing suspended fibers out of a vat of water on a screen, which was then rolled onto a stack of felts. Paper makers found that if they took these raw, wet pieces of paper and compressed them together, it formed a variant of pasteboard that was less likely to separate between pages, or delaminate. Pictured here is a bound volume of the Deseret News from 1856. The very worn board is beginning to delaminate which gives us a great view of individual “pages.” Because the board is never printed on directly and almost always covered, papermakers could include fiber that would normally be unacceptable for papermaking. Here you see small pieces of cloth and thread. Historical bookmaker Jim Croft calls this kind of board “barf board” because of the jumble of reject fibers that go into its production.



The Peril of the Times Displayed
Samuel Willard
Boston : Printed by B Green & J Allen sold by Benjamin Eliot 1700
BX7233 W4292 P47 1700

Scaleboard. The first paper mill in Colonial America wasn’t established until 1690. Rather than using expensive, imported book boards, bookbinders often used thin scales of wood in their place. These scaleboards, originally called scabbards, were much too brittle for the task of protecting a book, but when covered in paper or leather they made perfectly usable covers. This book was printed in Boston in the year 1700. The leather is now peeling away, allowing us to look at the wood scale beneath. The end grain of the board is visible at the fore-edge and spine of the book, instead of the traditional head and tail. It may be quarter-cut, the end grain shows only a slight curve. The board is a little warped, but the book has been through a lot, and scaleboard wasn’t expected to do the same heavy structural work as early wooden book boards were.

~Contributed by Jonathan Sandberg, Rare Books Assistant, with photographs by Scott Beadles, Rare Books Specialist

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Special Collections Reference has new hours!

03 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Uncategorized

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Please note: Special Collections has new reference desk hours. 

Monday through Friday 9A-5P

Open the following Saturdays during Fall Semester 2018, 10A-5P

August 25
September 08
September 22
October 06
October 20
November 03
November 17
December 01
December 08

For more information, please contact
Luise Poulton luise.poulton@utah.edu
Jon Bingham jon.bingham@utah.edu
Scott Beadles scott.beadles@utah.edu 

or call us at 801-585-6168

We look forward to seeing you! 

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We recommend — The Book Restructured: Wire-Edge Binding

17 Thursday May 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Recommended Workshop

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Arthur Larson, Book Arts Program, Book Arts Studio, collage, Daniel Kelm, Easthampton, Garage Annex School for Book Arts, gouache, Granary Books, Greta Sibley, Horton Tank Graphics, J. Willard Marriott Library, Jane Sherry, Jill Jevne, Jospeh A. Osina, Korea, New York City, Philip Gallo, photographs, printing, rare books, Rives BFK, rubber stamps, Small Offering Press, Sonam Temple, South Cholla Province, Terence K. McKenna, The Hermetic Press, Timothy Ely, typography, Wide Awake Garage, wire-edge binding


“Everything corresponds. Sweet is easy: happiness. Tanginess is trickier: people going the wrong way and calling it right; the tendency not to complain while harboring envious and covetous feelings. Sourness is things you like and don’t like — woven together. Smokiness is slow vision, seeing gradually the good things in life. What we find distasteful? That’s bitterness.”

Tea: Time in Korea
Greta Sibley
Easthampton, MA: Small Offering Press, 1994
DS904 S53 1994

Text and photographs based on three trips to Sonam Temple, South Cholla Province, Korea. Binding and box designed and produced by Daniel Kelm, Wide Awake Garage. Edition of twenty-five copies. Rare Books copy no. 14, signed by the author and the binder.


“The Book Restructured: Wire-Edge Binding”
A Book Arts Program workshop by Daniel Kelm

June 1 & 2, 2018
Friday & Saturday, 10:00 – 5:00
Book Arts Studio, J. Willard Marriott Library, Level 4

$215, register here

Wire-edge binding utilizes a thin metal wire along the hinging edge of each page. The metal wire is exposed at regular intervals, creating knotting stations where thread attaches one page to the next. The result is a binding that opens exceptionally well and provides the option of producing unusual shapes. This workshop presents various wire-edge structures useful for books, enclosures, and articulated sculpture. Participants produce both a simple codex and an accordion model that forms a tetrahedron. All levels of experience are welcome.

Daniel E. Kelm is a book artist who enjoys expanding the concept of the book. He is known for his innovative structures as well as his traditional work. In the mid-1980s, Daniel invented a style of bookbinding called wire-edge binding in order to explore the nature of the book as articulated sculpture. His expression as an artist emerges from the integration of work in science and the arts. Alchemy is a common theme in his bookwork. Daniel received formal training in chemistry and taught at the University of Minnesota and is known for his extensive knowledge of materials. Daniel teaches widely, and founded the Garage Annex School for Book Arts (GAS) in 1990. Most recently, with long-time collaborator Timothy Ely, Daniel co-delivered a lecture on The Alchemy of the Handmade Book at the Getty Center as a complement to the exhibition The Alchemy of Color in Medieval Manuscripts.

Rare Books is pleased to support the Book Arts Program with its collections.



“Decadence is sophistication severed from genuine feeling.”

Synesthesia
Terence K. McKenna (1946-2000)
New York City: Granary Books, 1992
N7433.4 M4285 S95 1992

Drawn and painted images by Timothy Ely. Typography and printing by Philip Gallo at The Hermetic Press. Paper is Rives BFK. Bookbinding by Daniel Kelm and staff, Wide Awake Garage. Edition of seventy five copies, twenty hors commerce. Rare Books copy is no. 47, signed by the author, printer and binder.



“I decide to go down the mountain to get a jar of fig sugar. The houses below feel very flimsy. I am greeted in one, by a cat that chases me barking like a dog back up the hill with an empty peanut butter jar.”

Venus Unbound
Jane Sherry
New York City: Granary Books, 1993
N7433.4 S418 V46 1993

The writer dreams. From the colophon: “The images were printed from metal plates made from the artist’s original paintings then treated with extensive hand-work: gouache, pen & ink, rubber stamps and collage…” Typography and printing by Philip Gallo at The Hermetic Press. Binding designed by Daniel Kelm. Box made by Jill Jevne. Edition of forty-one copies, eleven lettered. Rare Books copy is “A/P 2/2, signed by the author.



“The moon empties of light and is called new.”

Four Chambers, Five Nights
Greta Sibley
Easthampton, MA: Small Offerings Press, 1999
N7433.4 S5453 F68 1999

Text designed and composed by the author. Imagery created by Joseph A. Osina. Letterpress printed by Arthur Larson of Horton Tank Graphics. Binding and folders designed by Daniel E. Kelm at The Wide Awake Garage. Edition of twenty copies. Rare Books copy is no. 14.

— Photographs by Scott Beadles

 

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Curtis Census

10 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Publication

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American Indians, copper plates, Curtis Census, drawing, Edward Curtis, etchings, ethnography, field notes, French Impressionists, glass negative, glass positive, gravures, gum prints, handpress, J. Willard Marriott Library, Japanese handmade silk tissues, Mississippi, negatives, nineteenth century, painting, papers, photographer, photogravures, Pictorialism, platinotypes, printing process, rare books, rice paper, Scott Beadles, Seattle, sepia inks, Tim Greyhavens, Tissue, Van Gelder, vellum, watermark

Rare Books is pleased to announce the launch of the Curtis Census, a website produced by Tim Greyhavens for the global community. The J. Willard Marriott Library is one of the institutions that holds an entire set of Edward Curtis’ The North American Indian.

From Tim’s website: “Published by Edward Curtis from 1907 to 1930, The North American Indian was planned to be a limited edition of 500 sets. Due to the extremely high cost of the publication and the prolonged publication cycle, it’s thought that no more than 300 complete or partial sets were finally printed. This census will determine, as accurately as possible, the actual number of complete or partial sets that were printed and their present locations…Although The North American Indian is one of the great publications of all time, there is no definitive answer about how many sets were originally published. Curtis did not keep a master subscription list, and different documentation about the project provides conflicting information.”

Congratulations, Tim, on a great project.

Click here for the website’s biography of Edward Curtis. Curtis was born in 1868. 2018 is the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Click here for the website’s excellent article on Curtis’s The North American Indian.

Visit Rare Books to look at this remarkable set of photogravures.

THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN
Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952)
Seattle, WA: E. S. Curtis, 1907-30
E77 C97

A collection of 2,232 photogravures of American Indians taken between 1890 and 1930 and published between 1907 and 1930. A massive project, professional photographer Edward Curtis’ intention was to document every major tribe west of the Mississippi, portraying what he perceived to be a vanishing culture. While he was neither the first nor the last person to photograph the American Indian, he was surely the most prolific. His monumental publication presented to the public an extensive ethnographic study of numerous peoples.

The North American Indian consists of twenty portfolios of photogravures and twenty volumes of field notes bound with smaller gravures. A photogravure is made from a printing process utilizing a copper plate that is made from a glass positive which itself is made from a glass negative. The plate is hand wiped with sepia inks. Excess ink is removed and the plate is forced onto paper with a handpress, capturing all the etched details on the plate. The photogravure produces a soft, atmospheric appearance similar to that achieved by French Impressionist painters. This photographic process, along with drawing and painting on negatives, platinotypes and gum prints, was popular at the end of the nineteenth century. The movement, known as “Pictorialism” was a way for photographers to add personal vision and expression to their works.

The portfolio gravures were printed on three different papers, Van Gelder, a watermarked paper, Vellum, a rice paper, and Tissue, Japanese handmade silk tissues. Forty of the original sets were printed on Tissue, the rest equally split between Van Gelder and Vellum.

Images selected and scanned by Scott Beadles.

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Book of the Week — Promenade de Longchamp, Optique no. 4

28 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Book of the Week

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Archbishop de Beaumont, Bois-de-Boulogne, Champs-Élysées, concertina, convent, Easter Parade, fashion, hats, Holy Week, Kentucky Derby, Napoleon, Paris, Paris Opera, peepshow, Promenade de Longchamp, Tenebrae, tunnel book

Facade
— Photographs by Scott Beadles

PROMENADE DE LONGCHAMP, OPTIQUE NO. 4
Paris, ca. 1810

The Promenade de Longchamp was an annual social event which took place on the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of Holy Week every spring along the Champs-Élysées and through the Bois-de-Boulogne. The tour ended at the abbey of Longchamp, where the nuns sang the office of Tenebrae, a village four miles from Paris. A convent there, established in 1256, had long been a destination for religious pilgrims. In the late seventeenth century, the pilgrimage became unauthorized secular spectacle.

Through

The nun’s choir was fortified with singers from the Paris Opera. The theater in Paris was closed during Lent, which made the Promenade one of the few ways in which high society could flaunt their new spring fashions. A procession of people in festive costume traveled on horseback, in carriages, and on foot. Wealthy citizens of Paris vied to have the most elaborate carriages and clothing, while the lower classes, including laborers, soldiers, and prostitutes, lined the route to gawk. Police turned out in force, to keep the parade participants safe. The Paris Archbishop de Beaumont tried to halt the parade by ordering the convent closed during Holy Week. The parade did not stop. Participants were there to see and be seen.

Through2

In 1789, the Promenade was disrupted by an angry mob. The convent, by then wholly peripheral to the show, was closed by the Revolutionary government. Napoleon revived the parade in the 19th century, in part as a way to bolster the fashion industry, but the later parades did not match the lush grandeur of those in the 18th century. Still, the parade contributed to later fashion phenomena. The American “Easter Parade” and the big, ostentatious hats of the Kentucky Derby can be traced back to the Promenade de Longchamp.

Profile

This early 19th century concertina-style peepshow depicting the Promenade de Longchamp in Paris is etched on the front and back panes and contains four cut-out sections in-between, all hand-colored. The front panel has a circular viewing aperture. It is housed in its original marbled paper slip-case with engraved label.

Slipcase2

Slipcase

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Rare Books goes to UMFA

23 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Rare Books Loans, Recommended Exhibition

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Arabic Papyrus, Aziz S. Atiya, Brigham Young University, J. Willard Marriott Library, Lincoln Blumell, Lola Atiya, rare books, University of Utah, Utah Museum of Fine Arts

Greek inscription

A piece from the rare book collections is on loan at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, in its ongoing exhibition,  Ancient Mediterranean Art: Res Mortis. The piece may be viewed at the museum through September, 2018.

The carved fragment of limestone celebrates the life of Helene, to whom is given the credit “In peace and blessing Ama Helene, a Jew, who loves the orphans, [died]. For about 60 years her path was one of mercy and blessing; on it she prospered.”

The piece has been at the J. Willard Marriott for nearly thirty years, a gift of Aziz S. and Lola Atiya. Aziz Atiya founded the University of Utah’s Middle East Center and the Marriott’s Middle East Library in 1969. Rare Books holds many gifts from Dr. and Mrs. Atiya, including this epitaph and one of the largest collections of Arabic papyrus fragments in the world.

When the epitaph was given to the library, it was provisionally identified as a “Coptic inscription, dating from the dawn of the use of the Greek alphabet, not earlier than the second century, but not later than the third.”

Years later, in 2016, Lincoln Blumell, associate professor of ancient scripture, at Brigham Young University translated it, publishing his translation in Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period. News of the piece attracted world wide press attention.

For more information on Dr. Blumell’s translation see our previous post.

— photographs by Scott Beadles

 

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The Melody Lingers On

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Uncategorized

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1968, book, J. Willard Marriott Library, library, Scott Beadles, Wallace Stegner

Happy 50th Anniversary, J. Willard Marriott Library!

“To erect a great library in the year 1968 is an act of stubborn and sassy faith.” — Wallace Stegner, from his dedication address for the opening of the J. Willard Marriott Library

The melody lingers on.

Long live the book! Long live libraries!

(Thanks to Scott Beadles for great photographs)

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Beer libator

05 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Uncategorized

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Arad, beer libator, cult, cuneiform, Dr. Renee Kovacs, funerary banquet, grain, J. Willard Marriott Library, Kenneth Lieurance Ott, King Amar-Suen of Ur, libations, mill, Okanagan County Museum, priestesses, rare books, receipt, Special Collections, Sumerian, tablet, The University of Utah, Third Dynasty of Ur, Ur-mes, Washington

https://openbook.lib.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Tablet1080p11s.mp4

Photograph and stop motion by Scott Beadles.

Sumerian Cuneiform Tablet of Third Dynasty of Ur
PJ3824 B33
From the Kenneth Lieurance Ott Collection donated to the Okanangan County Museum, Washington, now in the Rare Books collection, J. Willard Marriott Library, the University of Utah.

Our thanks to Dr. Renee Kovacs for this translation.

This tablet will appear in the master database of cuneiform tablets, CDLI Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative  and the specialised database of administrative tablets of this period, the Third Dynasty of Ur: BDTNS Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts.

Sumerian Cuneiform Tablet of Third Dynasty of Ur

Administrative, receipt of grain

dated to King Amar-Suen of Ur, year 2 (ca. 2045 BC)

3.0 x 3.0 cm. The tablet is complete, 8 lines of Sumerian cuneiform, (6 obverse, 2 reverse).

The tablet records an amount of a grain (lillan”-grain) for provisions for the funerary cult of the former “lords”, that is the rulers, the en-priests and priestesses. The grain was issued from the mill by an official named Arad and received by an official Ur-mes with the title ‘beer libator”  This title was used specifically for an official who performed libations during the funerary banquet for the deceased rulers.

The English units of measure  in the translation do not reflect actual Sumerian volumes but merely the sequence of units, large to small, of the Sumerian.  The regnal years of kings were identified by assigning a  name for a significant event of that year.

1 0.2.2  4 silà (še <gur> lugal 2 “barrels”, 2 “gallons” 4 “quarts”  of lillan-grain
2 níg-dab5-en-en-ne provisions for the Lords
3 é-HAR-ta from the mill
4 ki Arad2-ta from Arad
5 Ur-mes kaš-dé-dé Ur-mes, libator for ritual meals,
6 šu ba-ti received.
rev 7 iti dLi9-si4 Month IX
8 mu Ur-bí-/lumki ba-hul Year (named) ” The year Urbilum was destroyed.”

 

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