This book was made possible by a grant from the Wellcome Trust, which allowed me to spend the 2005–6 academic year at the Collège de France and École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, through the invitation of J.-M. Durand. Further work on the manuscript was carried out during two research visits to the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, courtesy of Peter Damerow and Jürgen Renn. These visits were funded by grants from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (Wiederaufnahme Stipendium) and the TOPOI Excellence Cluster of the Freie Universität Berlin, with Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum as my Betreurerin.
The manuscript received a thorough and highly critical reading from Irving Finkel, which resulted in a major redrafting of the text.
I would like to thank a number of colleagues who have generously helped in providing illustrations for this volume. Frans Wiggermann and Dominique Collon kindly sent along their original drawings as well as photos from their own archives, and Tessa Rickards provided her drawing of an object in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin. Ulla Kasten supplied an old photo from the Yale Babylonian Collection taken by A. T. Clay, with permission to publish it. Béatrice André-Salvini graciously granted permission to publish photos from the Louvre taken by Florentina Badalanova Geller, to whom this volume is dedicated.
Finally, I would like to thank Galen Smith of Wiley-Blackwell for seeing this work through to publication and Clare Creffield for copy-editing the manuscript.