Cornell Squeeze Collection
About this collection
This digital collection is part of a larger aggregate of five distinct collecting areas on antiquities, which include plaster casts, ancient coins, gems, and photographs. Cornell University owns several collections of antiquities – originals and reproductions – from the ancient Mediterranean. Acquired mostly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, their primary purpose was to serve as hands-on material for teaching and research. Once housed on the ground floor of Goldwin Smith Hall, the University’s former Museum of Archaeology, they are now dispersed over several institutions, colleges, departments and buildings on campus.
Historical context
Cornell University Library hosts many squeezes collected during the Cornell Expedition to Asia Minor and the Assyro-Babylonian Orient (1907-1908).
The Cornell Expedition to Asia Minor and the Assyro-Babylonian Orient (1907-1908) was planned by John Robert Sitlington Sterrett, Professor and Chair of the then Department of Greek at Cornell. He had selected three recent Cornell alumni to lead it: Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead, Jesse E. Wrench, and Benson B. Charles. The main focus of the Expedition was on pre-classical history and archaeology and they made copies of numerous hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions (called Hittite inscriptions at the time), many newly discovered, which were published in 1911.
However, at the beginning of the Expedition, they spent two weeks securing a squeeze of the Res Gestae of the emperor Augustus as inscribed on the walls of the temple of Rome and Augustus in Ancyra (modern Ankara, Turkey), known as the Monumentum Ancyranum.
Using the collection
For questions about this collection, contact the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu.
More information
- Collection steward
- Katherine Reagan, Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator, Rare Books & Manuscripts
- Metadata creation
- Eric Rebillard (Classics) and Ben Anderson (Art History); Cornell University Library
- Funding
- Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences, awarded to Eric Rebillard and Benjamin Anderson, 2013
- Credits
- This collection overview was last reviewed in 2025.
- Collection sources