The Near Eastern Pictographic and Cuneiform Tablets, Seals and Incantation Bowls in the Schøyen Collection

Statement of Provenance (ownership history)

The holdings of pictographic and cuneiform tablets, seals and incantation bowls in the Schøyen Collection were collected in the late 1980s and 1990s and derive from a great variety of collections and sources. It would not have been possible to collect so many items, of such major textual importance, if it had not been based on the endeavour of some of the greatest collectors in earlier times. Collections that once held tablets, seals or incantation bowls now in the Schøyen Collection are:

  1. Institute of Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California (1970–94)
  2. Erlenmeyer Collection and Foundation, Basel (ca 1935–88)
  3. Cumberland Clark Collection, Bournemouth, UK (1920s–1941)
  4. Lord Amherst of Hackney, UK (1894–1909)
  5. Crouse Collection, Hong Kong and New England (1920s–80s)
  6. Dring Collection, Surrey, UK (1911–90)
  7. Rihani collection, Irbid and Amman, Jordan (before 1965–88) and London (1988–)
  8. Lindgren Collection, San Francisco, California (1965–85)
  9. Rosenthal Collection, San Francisco, California (1953–88)
  10. Kevorkian Collection, New York (ca 1930–59) and Fund (1960–77)
  11. Kohanim Collection, Tehran, Paris and London (1959–85)
  12. Simmonds Collection, UK (1944–87)
  13. Schaeffer Collection, College de France, Zürich (1950s)
  14. Henderson Collection, Boston, Massachusetts (1930s–50s)
  15. Pottesman Collection, London (1904–78)
  16. Geuthner Collection, France (1960s–80s)
  17. Harding Smith Collection, UK (1893–1922)

These collections are the source of almost all the tablets, seals and incantation bowls. Other items were acquired through Christie’s and Sotheby’s, where in some cases the names of their former owners were not revealed.

The sources of the oldest collections, such as Amherst, Harding Smith and Cumberland Clark, were antiquities dealers who acquired tablets in the Near East in the 1890s–1930s. During this period many tens of thousands of tablets came on the market, in the summers of 1893-94 alone some 30,000 tablets. While many of these were bought by museums, others were acquired by private collectors. In this way some of the older of these collections were the source of some of the later collections. For instance, a large number of the tablets in the Crouse collection came from the Cumberland Clark, Kohanim, Amherst and Simmonds collections, among others. The Claremont tablets came from the Schaeffer collection, and the Dring tablets came from the Harding Smith collection.

In most cases the original findspots of tablets that came on the market in the 1890s–1930s are unknown, like great parts of the holdings of most major museums in Europe and the United States. The general original archaeological context of the tablets and seals is libraries and archives of numerous temples, palaces, schools, houses and administrative centres in Sumer, Elam, Babylonia, Assyria, and various city states in present Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Many details of this context will not be known until all texts in both private and public collections have been published and compared with each other.