rounding the provenance of individual tablets as they are examined. Even with our rather
incomplete knowledge about the origins of many tablets, we can at least reconstruct very
basic chronological and geographical frameworks for describing the texts.
The History of the Collections
Texts from official libraries, such as those that are located in palaces or temples, make up
the bulk of our information, though their exact provenience is frequently uncertain. Such
was the state of the art in the middle to late nineteenth century that the actions of some
excavators were at times indistinguishable from those of looters. In addition to excavated
finds, many tablets were purchased by representatives of the European museums from
entrepreneurial locals. These local businessmen had the foresight to keep the locations of
large finds to themselves, selling off tablets in limited quantities while refusing to dis-
close their origins to protect their own commercial interests. Scholars still occasionally
discover fakes among the tablets purchased at this time, as the author has had occasion to
witness at the British Museum. Happily, we are not concerned here with the counterfeits
that were sold to the nineteenth century European archaeologists as authentic antiquities.
These are decidedly in the minority, and relatively easy to spot.^116 Rather, our concern is
for the accuracy of the records kept by those early archaeologists as to the find-spots of
(^116) Professor Marcel Sigrist has pointed out to me that in general the perpetrator of the hoax lacked suffi-
cient knowledge of the cuneiform script even to ensure all signs were facing the right way. On top of this,
fakes are often made of irregular clay types and can appear unusual in their coloration. As museums often
purchased tablets by the basket-full from antiquities dealers in Baghdad during the middle and late nine-
teenth century, it was not always possible for the counterfeit tablets to be discovered before they were
packaged and shipped.