Update! The CDLI has uploaded our tablets to their database, and
translated the first two. See: http://tinyurl.com/76fftnp We are
often asked about the oldest books in our collection. While the
earliest printed book dates to 1471, and our manuscripts date
back to the 5th century, our Babylonian cuneiform tablets can be
considered the oldest “books” in the collection. We’ve just
scanned all three of them, for the first time, in order to
contribute complete images of them to the Cuneiform Digital
Library Initiative at UCLA, a collaborative project to document
all the surviving tablets in the world. All three were acquired
in the 1960s as part of a suite of early examples of writing put
together as a teaching collection by The Foliophiles. These
groups of tablets and manuscript fragments were primarily sold
to colleges and universities to round out their teaching
collections in book and manuscript history. We have two tablets
and one cone. The tablets are generally recognized to have
recorded the records of busi