New ISAW Library Titles: September 2015

A list of books added to the ISAW Library in September 2015 is now available online both on the ISAW Library website and our Zotero library of new items. The titles are sorted in the website version according to thematic topics (e.g., "East Asia" and "Ancient Near East & Asia Minor"); and within each topic, the titles are organized according to Library of Congress classification. The authors and titles of works in non-Roman languages in their original script. Beginning with this month's list, we will also be including new print journal issues and links to new and notable electronic resources, such as the fifteen volumes in the American Studies in Papyrology series that were added to the Ancient World Digital Library in September.

Most of September's new titles focus on the Ancient Near East, due in large part to the acquisition of a number of items from the collection of Prof. Robert D. Biggs of the Oriental Institute of Chicago. Many of the titles from the Biggs collection are editions of Assyrian and Sumerian texts, which are of enormous value not only because of the primary material they contain, but because of their provenance. One notable example is Business documents of Murashû sons of Nippur dated in the reign of Artaxerxes I (464-424 B.C.) by H.V. Hilprecht and Albert T. Clay, the ninth volume in the University of Pennsylvania's never-completed series of publications from their Babylonian expedition. The copy of this title in Biggs' library is inscribed by Hilprecht to John Sparhawk, Jr., treasurer of the University of Pennsylvania's Archaeological Department: "To my valued friend + 'Old Babylonian' Mr. John Sparhawk Jun. / Nov. 10, 1898 H.V. Hilprecht." Sparhawk was a lawyer by trade, and his entry in the 1922 National Cyclopaedia of American Biography declares: "His memory was marvelous; his capacity for work prodigious; his alertness of mind and courage in attacking difficult problems and his unswerving will to accomplish large tasks were his dominating traits of character."¹ Sparhawk was particularly involved in Hilprecht's arrangements for his excavation at Nippur, but his name appears frequently in archival materials on a number of 19th and 20th century excavations in the Penn Museum Archives. His widow donated several pieces to the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, including a mummy cloth, a candlestick unguentarium from Roman Egypt, and a relief from India.

^{1. "Sparhawk, John, Jr." National Cyclopaedia of American Biography 18 (1922): p. 375. Web. Dec. 9, 2015.↩}