Volume 6 / Issue 2

By: W. Norman Brown

The Museum of the University of Pennsylvania owns several “boards”–they are actually made of cloth–used for playing the games known in India as pachisi (pacisi), chaupar (caupara), and chausar (causara). One of these is illustrated here. In the United States and elsewhere in the Western world a modified version of these Indian games, variously called […]

By: David Crownover

“In the beginning God created Black as well as White Men…God having created these two sorts of Men offered two sorts of Gifts, viz. Gold and Knowledge or Arts of Reading and Writing, giving the Blacks the first Election, who chose Gold, and left the Knowledge of Letters to the White.” This report of the […]

By: Louise Scott

(On seeing an Italian jug in the University Museum) The Adriatic shore of Italy across the sea from the Illyrian coast once saw the heyday of a pottery called Gnathia ware, Apulia’s ancient boast. It may be there a Grecian griffin went, cast in perpetual bronze. Such feral face, part bird, part snake, aggressive ornament […]

Their Function and Significance

By: Oscar W. Muscarella

One of the most interesting types of archaeological research is that concerned with tracing the history of a particular object in its development over many centuries and its adaptation in different lands. Much more interesting is this research if the object studied is one which is of general use in contemporary times. Pottery, of course, […]

By: C.J. Gadd

For over thirty years Dr. Legrain served as Curator of the Babylonian Section in the University Museum, an officer as distinguished as he was devoted. The work which he accomplished there must be better known to many citizens than to a distant colleague, however appreciative, who has to rely only upon his late friend’s publications […]

By: James B. Pritchard

“How do you go about finding a site for excavation?” is a question frequently put to an archaeologist. With the completion of five seasons of work at el-Jib, the ancient Gibeon, James B. Pritchard was sent to Jordan in May to search for another biblical site which the Museum might excavate profitably. In the following […]

By: Machteld J. Mellink

A stone hawk looks quizzically at the visitors of the special exhibit of the Lipchitz Collection. The label calls him Hittite in the general sense of the word, and the provenance of the bird is known to have been Asia Minor. Herman V. Hilprecht, Curator of the Babylonian Section of the University Museum from 1888 […]

By: William H. Davenport

When Captain James Cook, greatest of all Pacific explorers, accidentally discovered the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, he also discovered that centuries before Polynesians had somehow crossed thousands of miles of open sea into the north Pacific and established a society similar to those he knew in Tahiti and New Zealand. At this time Hawaiians numbered […]