With this volume the publication of the Schøyen Collection proceeds apace. In view of the range and diversity of the texts published here, A. R. George has wisely drawn upon the expertise of a constellation of luminaries specializing in historical texts from the third millennium bc to the Achaemenid period. The inscriptions published here exhibit not only chronological but also geographical breadth, with an Urartaean, an Achaemenid Persian and five Elamite inscriptions in addition to the bulk of Sumerian, Old Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian texts. The contents of the volume are as follows, with particular attention to the highlights and what is new.
Section I, for the third millennium, contains a miscellany of mostly new texts, edited by Piotr Steinkeller. The actual historical texts are supplemented by a document for the purchase of a house during the reign of Enmetena which, as Steinkeller points out, has some interesting and unusual features of legal terminology. Another unusual artefact here is an inscribed votive human foot, made of clay and bearing a plea to the deity for healing.
In Section II Claus Wilcke takes over and publishes a Gudea text, though not a Gudea inscription as such, which is to be dated to the Old Babylonian period. Wilcke writes that he had first thought this to be a random collection of phrases, but then realized that it does have some form of structure. What the text does is offer a selection of the phrases that occur commonly in the statue inscriptions of Gudea, and in more or less the sort of order that one would expect to meet them in an actual inscription, each phrase supplied with a rendering into Babylonian. This ends with a list of comestibles which would be required for offerings “for my statue”. One could suppose that the tablet amounts to a vade mecum for Babylonians who wished to read Gudea.
Section III of the volume contains a miscellany of fifteen royal inscriptions from the third millennium bc. As George points out, they are all “unexciting duplicates”, but the excellent photographs make this section of the book useful for classroom use. Section IV, by Konrad Volk, is again dedicated to a single text, a long and almost perfectly preserved new barrel inscription of Sin-iddinam of Larsa. In Section V, George again takes the baton with a further thirty royal inscriptions that mainly coincide with previously known texts. With its Section VI, from the keyboard of Grant Frame, the book turns to Assyria with eight royal inscriptions from the Middle and Neo-Assyrian periods. These include part of Tiglath-pileser I's annals, as well as inscriptions of Ashurnasirpal II, Sargon II and Ashurbanipal. Another remarkable text, a stele of Nebuchadnezzar II, is dealt with by George himself in Section VII. The stele is most notable for including, apart from the actual inscription, a depiction of a king standing in front of a ziggurat identified as Etemenanki. There are also ground plans, one on the stele's face and one on its left shoulder. Extensive discussion of these features and their significance is provided. The rest of Schøyen's Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions are published in Section VIII, again by George, and here there is further new material, two eye-stones dedicated to Nebuchadnezzar II, and two fragments of eighth-century commemorative inscriptions on cylinders. While one of these is a previously known inscription of Sargon II, the other helps to fill a gap in the historical record as it is the first attested inscription of the early eighth-century king Eriba-Marduk. As George points out, this text has importance beyond what might be suggested by its thirty-four lines of lacuna-ridden text, since it is rich in religious and cultural content. The remaining Mesopotamian section of the volume is right at the end, Section XIII, and along with the Gudea bilingual and the Nebuchadnezzar stele, is one of the highlights of the book. This is a clay cylinder inscribed with the text of the Laws of Ur-Namma and the editor, Miguel Civil, takes the opportunity to provide a full critical edition of the Laws using all the known text witnesses and supplying a new translation with full philological commentary. Section IX is devoted to five Elamite inscriptions, ably expounded by François Vallat, including one in the linear Elamite script that still hides its mysteries, while in Section X Mark Weeden guides the reader through a short Urartean inscription in which Minua, some of Ishpuini, “founds” a granary by the might of Ḫaldi.
Thus, the volume makes an extremely important contribution to Ancient Near Eastern historical studies over a series of wide fields, with the highest level of expertise lavished upon it by the team assembled by A.R. George. It may serve as a caution to those who would ignore unprovenanced material.
