Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schoyen Collection

The catalogue makes public 107 cuneiform texts that fall into the genres of royal inscription, commemorate inscription, chronology, and historiography, and other formal texts that shed light on historical figures and events. It adds considerably to the primary sources that since the 1860s have been among the tools being used to reconstruct the sequence of rulers and events across a span of two and a half millennia of ancient Mesopotamian history. The texts here derive from the Uruk period, around 3,000 BC, to the Persian period of Artaxerxes; geographically they range from Egypt and Iran to the cuneiform heartlands of Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)