David I. Owen Cuneiform Tablet Photo Archive

"... My photos were made for record purposes, to facilitate collation, and only occasionally for publication; hence their varied quality. At times I have been asked for copies of photos of specific texts that I had published in order to facilitate the research of others. During the years I spent at University Museum I photographed numerous Sumerian literary texts subsequently published by Professor Åke W. Sjöberg and a number of other scholars. In 1991, Elizabeth C. Stone and I published Adoption in Old Babylonian Nippur and the Archive of Mannum-mešu-lissur in which the Cornell tablets were published utilizing the same system. In time I realized that the corpus of photos I had accumulated might provide a valuable resource for those interested in the study of scribal hands or simply to check tablets against published copies without having to examine the original texts. I also recognized that the reproduction of these photos, via the digital medium, was generally superior to most previous and current print publications. My participation in the CDLi project at UCLA encouraged me to archive my photos so that they might be made available over the Internet or otherwise disseminated via CD or DVD. It so happened that my son, Ethan, was available to prepare a web site, scan all my negatives and to create the files with which the photos could be distributed. Grants from the Rosen Family Foundation and the Occasional Publication Fund of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, facilitated the work ..."