Edith Porada (1912-1994) was born in Vienna, where she grew up and obtained her doctorate on the Akkadian cylinder seals of Ancient Iraq in 1935. She moved to New York in 1938. During the next decade she catalogued the seal impressions from Nuzi near Kirkuk in Iraq (1947) and wrote the important two-volume Corpus of the Ancient Near Eastern Seals in the Pierpont Morgan Library Collection (1948) as curator of that collection. From 1958 until her death she taught at Columbia University in New York. In the 1980s she was asked to write the present volume and worked on the seals every summer in the British Museum.
