The long journey from East to West
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What you see here, is a small label that is glued to the tablet, which reads ‘P 33’. The P stands for Peiser. Felix Ernst Peiser (1862-1921) was a German Assyriologist, who purchased this tablet at an antiquity shop in Istanbul (then Constantinople) in 1897. Peiser bought the tablet together with another tablet of about the same size, with a very similar kind of inscription. Nowadays, this would be unthinkable, but in those days it was allowed to buy antiquities abroad and to export them to your own country. Both the tablets became part of Peisers private antiquity collection in Königsberg, where they were numbered as objects nos. 33 and 34.
After Peisers death, his widow sold his private collection of cuneiform tablets to Frans de Liagre Böhl (1882-1976). The new owner moved the tablets from Königsberg to Groningen, where he was professor at that time. The tablets traveled even further west in 1927, when Böhl was appointed professor of Assyriology at Leiden University. In the 1950’s, he sold his antiquity collection, including the former collection of Peiser, to the NINO (Netherlands Institute for the Near East) where it remains to this day. At some point, the tablet received a new inventory number; if you flip the tablet, you can see the number ‘LB 892’ written in black ink on the other edge, LB being short for De Liagre Böhl.
Though we can retrace the journey of the tablet since 1897, we know virtually nothing about its origin. It may stem from the Cappadocia region in Turkey, but this is not certain