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From Stevens Institute of Technology

 




My father has been deceased since May 2003, about 2 months subsequent to his 70th birthday. 

But I still somehow receive quarterly issues of his alumni magazine, from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. 

The Winter '22 issue featured "gifts from the ancient world," a story about cuneiform tablets to be found in an "unassuming storage box on the second floor" of the institute's library. The  box and the tablets are there because the first president of S.I.T., Dr. Henry Morton, was an amateur archaeologist, with a special interest in the Mesopotamian City of Uruk, from more that 4 thousand years ago. 

The story lists contents both fascinating and random. "Four of the tablets in the collection detail produce and livestock transactions (including taxes payable in sheep and other animals) two are temple records, two are offerings by pilgrims to Ishtar...."

Not many stories cause me to mutter, "I really ought to visit Hoboken soon." But this one does. Can just anybody get to look at, if not actually to hold, this ancient clay?  

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  1. Paul D. Van PeltMarch 24, 2022 at 8:46 AM

    You are extremely fortunate! I had no knowledge of these artifacts, but they are a historic prize---I am assuming they are authentic. Origins in history are a favorite hobby of mine, forming one basis for a theory of contextual reality I have been mulling over and re-framing. Some of that is predicated on how and why we have gotten 'from eternity to here'. If that phrase fires a neuron or nudges a ventricle, Websearch Sean Carroll, if you do not already know of him.

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