By Charles E. Jones - Institute for
Study of the Ancient World, New York, and
Seunghee Yie - Department of
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
ARTA 2011.003
Ernst Herzfeld’s field photographs from the 1932 excavation
season at Persepolis include three pictures of a large fragment of a
cuneiform tablet (Herzfeld Nos. 32.85 a & b [= Oriental Institute
No. 12979] and 32.86 a [= No. 12978]; see Fig. 1).1 The photographs were
made in the year before the discovery of the first Persepolis Fortification tablets in March, 1933, and about four years before the
excavation of the first Persepolis Treasury tablets in 1936 (Schmidt
1939: 3-37; 1957: 4f.).
Although this was the first cuneiform tablet discovered by the Oriental
Institute’s excavations at Persepolis, there is no mention of it in the
publications of Herzfeld or of Erich Schmidt, who succeeded him as
director of the excavations, or in those of George G. Cameron or Richard
T. Hallock, who undertook the publication of the many Treasury and
Fortification tablets found later. Perhaps Herzfeld was not excited by a
fragment with a text that was mostly numbers and “dittos” and a few
words that would have been incomprehensible in 1932, accompanied by the merest traces of a seal impression.
It
is tempting to infer from these photographs that Herzfeld made trial
excavations in the Treasury as early as the season of 1932, but no
records of such an effort survive....
Persepolis in Pleiades http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/922695
