Inscriptions from NY.Ith.CU

Cornell University once owned a collection of some 800 plaster casts of sculptures, inscriptions, and architectural elements from different cultures and periods, including the ancient Near East, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome (the majority), the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the 19th century. The collection also comprised some 1000 plaster reproductions of gemstones, architectural models, and more abstract drawing models. Of this substantial collection – compiled in the 1890s with funding from trustee Henry Sage and originally installed in McGraw Hall, then moved in 1906 into Goldwyn Smith Hall – only a portion survives, often in poor condition, the greater part having been consigned in the 1980s to storage in an out of use water cooling plant, the remains now being dispersed across the Cornell University campus.

Cornell Classics and Art History professors Annetta Alexandridis and Verity Platt currently oversee a database and website aimed at reconstituting the collection virtually and enabling students and scholars outside the campus to access its inventory. The materials reassembled thus far include a notable number of casts of inscriptions in languages of the ancient Mediterranean: not only Greek (24) and Latin (6) but Luwian (5), Old Persian (2), Etruscan (1), Moabite (1), and several bilingual monuments in Greek and a second language: Palmyrene Aramaic, Lykian, and demotic Egyptian (the Rosetta stone). In November and December of 2024, Alexandridis and Platt mounted an exhibition of the collection, “Firing the Canon: The Cornell Casts and Their Discontents”, at its current location in the Weinhold Chilled Water Plant next to Beebe Lake.

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Greek

Latin