This series of scholarly publications focuses on the collection of cuneiform tablets and inscriptions in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. These objects were acquired largely during the 1880s, when the Metropolitan became the first American museum to collect a substantial number of cuneiform texts. Today, the Museum's holdings total about six hundred texts and fragments. The four volumes in this series will make these texts available in a manner that will instruct and inform as wide an audience as possible. Cuneiform Texts in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume III: Private Archive Texts from the First Millennium B.C., co-authored by Ira Spar and Eva von Dassow with contributions by J.N. Postgate and Linda B. Bregstein, admits us to the private worlds of several of the leading financial families of Babylon during the Neo- and Late Babylonian periods of Mesopotamian history and illuminates the management and investment practices of family-run Babylonian enterprises. Four Assyrian tablets included here illustrate business practices during Neo-Assyrian times as well. The 164 texts and fragments that comprise the Museum's holdings from private family archives written during the first millennium B.C. are presented in a format that includes copies, transliterations, and commentary together with drawings, photographs, and commentary on stamp seal, cylinder seal, and ring impressions. Volume I of this series contains 120 tablets, cones, and bricks of the third and second millennia B.C., notably commercial and legal texts as well as letters. Literary and scholastic texts primarily from the first millennium B.C. are forthcoming in Volume II. The current publication, Volume III, covers private archive texts from the first millennium B.C. Volume III, in preparation, will include and edition of cuneiform tablets from Babylonian temples written during the first millennium B.C., along with royal records of the kings of Babylon and Assyria inscribed on bricks, cylinders, and prisms.

This important scholarly work is volume two in a series of four volumes that will publish all the more than six hundred cuneiform tablets in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Included are 106 religious, scientific, scholastic, and literary texts, written in Sumerian and Akkadian and primarily dated to the latter part of the first milennium B.C. They shed new light on the civilization of the ancient Near East—on its complex beliefs and customs and surprisingly vast knowledge of mathematics and astronomy—for both the contemporary scholar and interested reader. The texts are organized in five sections: Documents of the Incantation Priest, Diviner, Physician, and Magician reveal various categories of omens; Literary texts present myths and legends; The Scholastic tradition contains a variety of texts and lists, including mathematical and astronomical texts; and the final section covers Unidentified Fragments. Among the most important texts are No. 42, a fragments of the Babylonian version of the ancient Flood story, and No. 81, which attests to the intellectual achievement of Babylonian astronomers. Eighteen distinguished international scholars in the field have contributed transliterations and translations of each tablet, and these are accompanied by commentaries and by insightful introductory essays on each genre. The volume was assembled and edited by Ira Spar, Professor of Ancient Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and W. G. Lambert, Professor Emeritus of the University of Birmingham, England. Lambert also contributed several entries and a general introduction that provides contextual information about the transmission of the literary and scholastic tradition in pre-Hellenistic Mesopotamia. The precise facsimile drawings of every tablet handmade by Ira Spar are a valuable visual accompaniment to the text. This publication reaffirms the Museum's ongoing commitment to promote wider knowledge of Ancient Near Eastern civilization. And significantly, it appears at a time when better understanding of the history and culture of that region of the world holds particular relevance. Volume one of this series (1988) documents 120 tablets, cones, and bricks from the third and second millennia B.C. Volume three (2000) covers private archive texts from the first millennium B.C. Volume four, in preparation, will include an edition of cuneiform tablets written in the first millennium B.C. and inscriptions on bricks, cylinders, and prisms of royal records of the kings of Babylon and Assyria.

This long-anticipated work is the final volume of the CTMMA series and completes the publication of all the cuneiform-inscribed tablets and inscriptions (excluding those on sculptures, reliefs, and seals) in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Published are 183 texts that include 154 cuneiform tablets and tablet fragments, one inscribed clay bulla, fourteen clay cylinders, five clay prisms, and four stone inscriptions. Economic and Administrative texts are from Sippar, Babylon, Kish, Dilbat, Nippur, Drehem, Uruk, and other sites in Babylonia and ancient Iran. First millennium B.C. royal inscriptions date to the reigns of Ashurnasirpal, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal, Nebuchadnezzar, and Nabonidus. The texts are organized in five parts: Part One contains Neo- and Late Babylonian economic and administrative tablets and fragments from the archives of the Ebabbar temple in Sippar. Part Two includes Neo- and Late Babylonian period economic and administrative tablets from Babylonia and other sites. Part Three includes Late Babylonian administrative and archival tablets from Babylon. Part Four contains royal and non-royal brick, stone, bulla, cylinder, and prism inscriptions from the second and ¬first millennia B.C. A final section (Part Five) includes three proto-cuneiform archaic tablets and two Ur III administrative tablets. Professors Ira Spar (Professor of Ancient Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey and Research Assyriologist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Michael Jursa (University Professor of Assyriology, University of Vienna) were assisted by a team of distinguished scholars and conservators who provided valuable insights into the preparation of scholarly editions of the texts, seal impressions, and technical analysis published in this volume. Ira Spar hand copied and made facsimile drawings of the Museum’s texts with the assistance of Charles H. Wood. Jo Ann Wood-Brown and Charles H. Wood prepared drawings of seal impressions and divine symbols. This four-volume series of publications reaffirms the Museum’s ongoing commitment to promoting wider knowledge of ancient Near Eastern civilizations. Volume one documents 120 tablets, cones, and bricks from the third and second millennia B .C. Volume two publishes 106 religious, scientific, scholastic, and literary texts written in Akkadian and Sumerian that primarily date to the later part of the ¬first millennium B.C. Volume three includes 164 private archival texts and fragments from the first millennium B .C.

This book is the initial publication in a four-volume series on the collection of cuneiform tablets and inscriptions in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. It is a scholarly study of objects acquired largely during the 1880s, when the Metropolitan became the first American museum to acquire a substantial number of cuneiform texts. Today the Museum's collection totals more than five hundred texts and fragments; the publication of these volumes will make these texts available in a manner that will instruct and inform as wide an audience as possible. Cuneiform Texts in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume I: Tablets, Cones, and Bricks of the Third and Second Millennia B.C. presents 120 commercial texts, legal texts, and letters, along with cones and bricks, from ancient Mesopotamia. This material is offered in both transliteration and translation, with drawings and selected photographs of the tablets as well as descriptions, drawings, and photographs of the seal impressions appearing on them. Features of special interest in this volume include the presentation of Sumerian ledger-account translations in modern accounting formats; allocations for the royal family of the Sumerian king Sulgi of the Third Dynasty of Ur; an Old Babylonian military confrontation with the Kassites, as disclosed in correspondence; Old Assyrian correspondence involving smuggling, moth-eaten textile shipments, legal testimony, and a caravan report presented in both textual translation and modern-ledger format; as well as new collations and translations of Amarna-period royal correspondence. Ira Spar is the editor of the Museum's cuneiform-tablet project, with a distinguished international group of collaborators assisting in the preparation of the texts. Each scholar has prepared manuscripts within his respective field of expertise, and hand copies of the tablets and seal inscriptions have been drawn by Dr. Spar. The inclusion in this volume of a comprehensive catalogue of the seal impressions on the tablets and cases illustrates the Museum's interest in publishing these works of art in their original context. The seal impressions are presented with brief commentary together with photographs and scale drawings prepared by Holly Pittman, Associate Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum. The second volume of this series will contain the literary and scholastic texts from the second millennium B.C. to the first century A.D.; the third volume will present the administrative, commercial, and legal tablets from the first millennium B.C. A final short volume will contain all cuneiform inscriptions found on objects in the Museum's collections.

“The American West in Bronze, 1850–1925” is the first full-scale exhibition to explore the aesthetic and cultural impulses behind the creation of statuettes with American western themes, which have been so popular with audiences then and now. Both the exhibition and this accompanying catalogue offer a fresh look at the multifaceted roles played by these sculptors in creating three-dimensional interpretations of western life, whether based on historical fact, mythologized fiction, or most often, something in-between. Examples by such archetypal representatives of the West as Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell are complemented by the work of sculptors such as James Earle Fraser and Paul Manship, who contributed to the popularity of the American bronze statuette even though their western subjects were less frequent.

German Masters of the Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany has been published in connection with the largest and most important exhibition devoted to nineteenth-century German paintings and drawings ever held in North America. Nineteenth-century German art, eclectic in its expression, was strongly influenced by the political, social, and economic forces of an intellectually fertile age. The ninety-six paintings and fifty-four drawings included in this catalogue focus on the five major German artistic movements from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth century: Romanticism, the Nazarenes, Idealism, Realism, and Impressionism. Among the artists represented are Friedrich, Runge, Blechen, Cornelius, Koch, Leibl, Lenbach, Menzel, Thoma, Corinth, Liebermann, and Slevogt. German Masters of the Nineteenth Century provides a penetrating view of the pluralistic character of nineteenth-century German art. Essays by Professor Gert Schiff, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Dr. Stephan Waetzoldt, General Director, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, provide a careful examination of artists and styles and an analysis of the historical, social, and aesthetic contexts so crucial to a full understanding of nineteenth-century German art. This volume also includes a biography of each artist and an extensive bibliography. The works included here, their accompanying texts, and the scholarly essays comprise a publication indispensable to scholars and art lovers with an interest in this long-neglected but significant period of European art.

In this eighth volume of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's series, Papers, William Mills Ivins Jr. asserts that the rationalization of sight—the development of symbols and grammar for visual representation—was the most significant advancement made during the Renaissance. This slim but informative volume especially highlights the use of Euclidean Geometry in the works of Renaissance artists Leon Battista Alberti and Albrecht Dürer as evidence of the increased interest in developing a rational and systemic method for translating sensory input onto the flat surface of the picture plane.