Library News: ISAW Library Collections Update

By David Ratzan
10/27/2014

The ISAW Library purchased the collection of Hayim and Miriam Tadmor in 2010, but the cataloging of previous acquisitions meant that we only had the opportunity to turn to this important collection in the past year. The Tadmor collection has great strengths in first millennium Mesopotamian texts and history, and in Northwest Semitic Philology, Bible, and Israeli orientalist publications of the twentieth century. It is also rich in excavation reports for sites in Palestine. Part of the fun of dealing with the collections of great scholars like the Tadmors is that you never know what you might find besides books in the way of marginalia, course packets, correspondence, etc. Just today, for instance, one of the boxes we had delivered from storage contained type-scripts of lectures given by the late Martin Bernal of what eventually became Black Athena! The time has come, however, to make a final push to finish the cataloging of this wonderful collection, which we hope to achieve by the end of this academic year.

Along with the Tadmor collection, there has been another, smaller collection awaiting processing. This is a collection of Persian-language material related to the history and archaeology of ancient Persia, with a special focus on ancient water use, technology, and hydraulics. As with the Tadmor collection, we hope to have this material on the shelves, available to researchers, sometime in early 2015.

Finally, the ISAW library is very pleased to have received the generous donation of Natasha Eilenberg's library of books on Indian, Himalayan, and Southeast Asian art. Eilenberg was an independent scholar specializing in Khmer art. She became a renowned art collector, assembling an impressive collection of Indian and Southeast Asian sculptures and ritual artifacts, and her library, containing over 200 volumes, will strengthen ISAW’s holdings in Indian and Southeast Asian art. There will be a more detailed announcement of this gift on the ISAW Library blog in the near future.

You may follow our progress on these collections through our monthly list of new items, available online from the ISAW Library website and Zotero (July's books should appear next week), and keep up with other ISAW Library projects through the ISAW Library blog.