231 The present contribution is dedicated to Marcel Sigrist, who has spent many years working in the Students Room of the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum cataloging and editing Neo-Sumerian texts, particularly the thousands of fragments that ˜ll the storerooms of museums. This is an exhausting task that continues to be burdened by the ˜rst impression of these documents that led H. Pognon to describe them as “laundry lists.” 1 This paper, which starts from one of those small frag- ments, wishes to show how this ˜eld of research is a source of great surprise and emotion for those few people who venture to study it. The ˜rst part is written in the ˜rst person, and is meant to be a diary of the usual activities carried out at the British Museum during the past years. It aims to be a document that on the one hand can be used as a source for future historiographic research, and on the other hand gives a more human per- spective on our work. 2 Neo-Sumerian Texts from “Sippar”? In 2005 I spent a six months doing research in the Students Room, working on the catalog and tran- scribing Ur III documents. 3 This was a long stretch of research, and going through the collections of the Museum, I began to take an interest in the organization of such collections and in their structure, assisted and spurred on by C. B. F. Walker who, at the time, was deputy keeper of the department. 1. See n. 48. 2. As claimed, for example, by A. Westenholz, “The Early Excavators of Nippur,” in Nippur at the Centennial: Papers Read at the 35 e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Philadelphia, 1988, ed. M. deJ. Ellis. Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 14 (Philadelphia: The University Museum, 1992), 291–95. 3. This work was possible thanks to a grant of the Accademia dei Lincei and the British Academy. Some of the results have been published in the series Nisaba. RASSAM’S ACTIVITIES AT TELLO (1879) AND THE EARLIEST ACQUISITION OF NEO-SUMERIAN TABLETS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM Lorenzo Verderame (Università di Palermo) I am deeply indebted to Christopher Walker, who proposed the topic of this paper, produced documents from the British Museum archives, and read the manuscript. All the pictures were taken by me and published, together with the texts, with the permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.