A Marad Cylinder in the Finnish Heritage Agency: Studying Old Collections with Unclear Provenances

Located in the storage of the archaeological collections of the Finnish Heritage Agency lies a well-preserved clay cylinder inscribed with cuneiform script. The text on it describes the building activities of the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II (604–562 BCE), and in particular recounts his renovation of the temple of the god Lugal-Marada in Marad. As one of around fifty known recensions of this inscription, the Helsinki Cylinder reveals limited new historical information. Instead, much more pressing is the question of how the cylinder arrived in Finland and how it ended up seemingly forgotten in the storage of the Finnish Heritage Agency. In this article, we trace the cylinder’s journey to Finland, discuss how we, as scholars, should deal with unprovenanced objects such as this one, and provide an edition of the text it contains,