Fonds SC65 - Notebook: ‘Catalogue of Assyrian Letters, etc’

One notebook, handwritten

This notebook came to the RAS archives as part of the Reginald Campbell Thompson papers, donated by John Nicholas Postgate in 2024. It was previously catalogued as RCT/6, as part of the Reginald Campbell Thompson collection. However, it was later discovered that this would not have been a Reginald Campbell Thompson notebook, given its content, and a decision was made to remove it from the collection and catalogued it separately as a Special Collections item.

The notebook was acquired from John Nicholas Postgate via the Griffith Institute of Oxford.

Notebook containing catalogue entries of the Assyrian letters inscribed on clay tablets that were found at the excavations led by Max Mallowan, archaeologist and academic, at Nimrud, Iraq in 1952. Each entry records the measurements of the clay tablet, number of lines on it and the location at which it is found, running from the reference numbers ND 2350 to ND 2499, and from ND2601 to ND 2803. The writing is in several different hands so was probably compiled by the members on the excavation team led by Mallowan.

Open. Please contact the archivist.

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Details about the Nimrud excavations in 1952 can be found in Max Mallowan's book 'Twenty-five years of Mesopotamian discovery, 1932-1956', a copy of which is available at the RAS Library.

The letters were later published by H. W. F. Saggs in consecutive volumes of the journal 'Iraq', and in his volume 'The Nimrud Letters, 1952'.

This collection was catalogued by James Liu, RAS Archivist, in March 2025.