To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Your sophomore wrote a good story and can congratulate himself on seeing it published on page one with picture (Thursday, December 15). Hopefully, however, his course papers present a better assessment of facts.

"The world's oldest known map" has fortunately not been missing for years, but has been and is safely housed in the Baghdad Museum (item No. 50711), Iraq. What our student saw was only a plaster cast of the object, but how can one expect a sophomore to know a cast when he sees one?

When our discerning student inspected said object, he was not in the basement of the Center for International Affairs, he was in the Semitic Museum, the three seminar rooms in which are the very center of the activities of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literature! Harvard has many byways, and it takes time to find one's way around!

The collections of the Semitic Museum, it is true, are now a research collection, and are not open for regular inspection, except to groups by appointment, for the very reasons noted in "news-report" referred to above. G. Ernest Wright, Curator   The Semitic Museum