PREFACE. 
For twenty years I have given a good part of the minutes or hours that could 
be spared from very engrossing daily office-work to the study of Oriental seal 
cylinders. I first hoped to be able to master the cuneiform texts, and had begun the 
study as far back as 1862; but the driblets of time which could be taken for it, 
often with long periods when nothing could be done, were not sufficient to achieve 
a task which needed all one’s time if merely to keep in memory the forms of so 
complex a system of writing. Not being myself a professional Orientalist, I there- 
fore sought an easier task and a field which did not seem to be overmuch trodden 
by scholars, and yet where M. Ménant and M. Heuzey might be my teachers. As 
it was not possible for me to study in libraries or museums, I was compelled to 
depend wholly on my own library for books and on my own efforts to collect cylin- 
ders, as far as possible, and casts of those in museums or in the possession of private 
persons. By the favor of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and of the office 
in which I was employed as editor, I was able to spend a part of two summers in 
Europe, and I hereby express the warmest thanks to M. Heuzey, of the Louvre, 
to M. Babelon, of the Bibliothéque Nationale, and to Professor Delitzsch and 
Dr. Messerschmidt, of the Berlin Museum, where I was allowed to make careful 
notes of all their fine collections of cylinders and to obtain casts of all that I wished. 
Nothing could have been more generous than their courtesy and their help. I had 
been allowed a similar opportunity for study some years before at the British 
Museum, and was able again briefly to reéxamine its fine collection of cylinders, 
for which favor I owe thanks to Dr. Budge. It is very much to be desired that 
these entire collections should be published in as admirable a style as that in which 
M. de Clercq published his fine collection. JI am also indebted to numerous owners 
of smaller collections of cylinders, among whom I may mention the late Lord 
Southesk, Mrs. Henry Draper, the Marquis de Vogué, and M. Schlumberger. I 
have also had the advantage of the fine collection which has passed into the posses- 
sion of Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan since the text of this volume was written and 
which, since the de Clercq collection has gone to the Louvre, is now by far the 
largest collection in private hands and is particularly rich in Syro-Hittite cylinders. 
Of the public collections in this country the Metropolitan Museum has acquired 
by far the largest number of cylinders, most of them obtained by purchase from my 
own collections; but I have been able to make use of its numerous Cypriote cylin- 
ders, gathered by the late General di Cesnola and published in his “Atlas” of 
Cypriote antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum, also that collected by A. P. di 
Cesnola and published in his “Salaminia.”’ 
I have received through the kindness of Professor Lyon the privilege of taking 
casts of the cylinders in the Semitic Museum of Harvard University; and to the 
courtesy of Professor Hilprecht I owe the same privilege in connection with the 
collection of cylinders obtained in the expeditions to Nippur of the University of 
Pennsylvania. To many others, by whom I have been allowed to receive casts of 
cylinders in their possession, I give acknowledgment in the text of this volume. 
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