Two scholars have written a paper describing ancient artifacts held in the Knox College Special Collections. The paper "Cuneiform Texts in the Special Collections of Knox College" appeared in a 2015 issue of the journal Cuneiform Digital Library Bulletin. In the paper Liu Changyu and John P. Nielsen describe the artifacts and provide transcriptions and translations of the texts on the stone tablets.
The ancient tablets date from the Ur III period, circa 2100 bc. One of the tablets is a school text and the rest are are described by the authors as "administrative tablets". A cylinder seal is also included in the collection.
A few of the objects were most likely donated to Knox College in 1923 by William Mackintire Salter, a graduate of Knox in 1871. Mr. Salter was a prominent philosopher and scholar in his day, having written a work about Nietzsche and a text called Ethical Religion. Mrs. Harriet Robbins Moses (Knox College class of 1912) made a bequest of two tablets to the College in the late 1920s. It is wonderful to have this small set of objects accessible for study nearly 100 years later.
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