The professor's collection

You are looking at a drawer full of objects inside the vault of the library of the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO). The NINO is well-known for its library containing an extensive collection of books on the ancient Near East and Egypt. You might also know that the Institute houses the Böhl collection, a collection of antiquities brought together by Frans Böhl (later De Liagre Böhl), who was professor of Assyriology in Leiden from 1927 to his retirement in 1953. The bulk of the collection is made up of thousands of cuneiform clay tablets, which Böhl bought on his travels in the Near East. The Institute prides itself on this cuneiform collection; students of Assyriology read the tablets in their classes on the Akkadian language, and scholars from around the world come to the NINO to study them.

But most people do not know that the Böhl collection is more than just clay tablets. It also houses some 600 ‘non-cuneiform’ objects, some of them also collected by Böhl, some donated to the institute later. This part of the collection has, however, remained unstudied and even uncatalogued throughout the years.

In 2024, the NINO, including its collection of antiquities, will move to a new location on the new Leiden Humanities Campus; and this also means its collection of antiquities will be moved. To prepare for this move, we have spent several months cataloging the non-cuneiform objects from the Böhl collection. In this story, you can read all about the objects we have encountered.