Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500–300 b.c. (review)

Assyriology is the study of the languages, histories, and intellectual legacies of those ancient cultures whose literate members wrote their words on clay tablets in scripts we call cuneiform. Initial decipherment of these ancient scripts and the families of languages they record was accomplished barely a century and a half ago. Some of these languages, such as Akkadian, Sumerian, Ugaritic, and Hittite, are more or less well understood and are the subjects of burgeoning corpora of philological and linguistic scholarly apparatus. Others such as Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, and Hattic remain poorly understood. Assyriology is a young field. On the other hand, the traditions that these languages and scripts represent are ancient. The earliest readable Sumerian texts date from the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E., and the last known Akkadian text is dated in the middle of the first century C.E. The intervening three millennia cover substantially more than half the span of recorded human history.

It is a curiosity of history that virtually nothing of these ancient written traditions survives in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim written traditions. Not a single cuneiform text was collected, copied, transcribed, or described in the monastic traditions of Europe or Western Asia. Before the Enlightenment, the significance of these ancient cultures was understood solely with respect to their appearance in and significance to the stories of the Bible. As a consequence, Assyriology has developed an intellectual tradition in which the ancient manuscript has been the primary focus of scholarship. The training of students focuses on the details of reading broken and incomplete manuscripts and of assembling masses of manuscript material into slightly more coherent textual editions. In the case of compositions representing ancient literary or intellectual traditions such editions might have dozens or scores of manuscripts, dating over a span of hundreds or thousands of years. It is nevertheless the case that each manuscript is also understood to have (or to have once had) an archaeological context. Cuneiform tablets are never, or almost never, found in isolation. That documents discovered in proximity to one another are related is an assumption made by early archaeologists working in Mesopotamia. This assumption was soon borne out by internal evidence such as the colophons on literary tablets from Assurbanipal's library identifying them by things such as copyist, source, composition, and date. Similarly, documents such as letters and legal texts found together were soon proved to show internal unifying characteristics such as date and personnel mentioned. Many, perhaps most, of the very many cuneiform texts acquired not by legitimate excavation but by illicit digging and the antiquities trade can also be assigned contexts based on script, date, genre, and content.

The title under review is a fascinating and entirely successful compendium of the data relevant to the attributes of known archives and libraries together with the documents assigned to them. Based on a thorough knowledge of the huge corpus of text publication and archaeological literature, the author carefully and precisely describes the characteristics of more than two hundred individual archives and libraries ranging in size from a few documents to tens of thousands. He includes general characterizations of each archive or library; specific arguments for the assignment of particular texts to one or another archive or library; assessments of the philological and archaeological data supporting the assignment; and, whenever possible, architectural plans and details indicating their find spots. The author is himself an accomplished Assyriologist, and the section on archives and libraries from the city of Assur (pages 132-43) reflects his years of study on the documents from that site. The introductory chapter is a welcome replacement for the old standard assessments of libraries and archives in the Mesopotamian world (Møgens Weitmeyer, Babylonske og assyriske arkiver og biblioteker [Copenhagen: Branner og Korch, 1955] and the initial chapter of Ernst Posener, Archives in the Ancient World [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972]).

This book is...