Trevor Bryce, lead author of this Atlas and honorary professor of the University of Queensland, is credited with several history books, mainly on ancient Anatolia. His research interests have developed from ancient Lycia to the ancient Near East as a whole. Being an historian and a philologist, he decided on the support of an archaeologist, Jessie Birkett-Rees, a lecturer at Monash University, in order to cover topics connected with prehistory and archaeological aspects of later periods.
This atlas is related to a previous work by the same author, The Routledge Handbook of Peoples and Places of Ancient Western Asia (2009) (PPAWA), with 1,500 entries (peoples, lands, and places) arranged alphabetically and a broad team of contributors, each a specialist for a given area; unfortunately it included only a few black-and-white maps. This atlas, instead, encompasses 76 chapters, each of them connected with an area and/or a period, including texts, sometimes images, and one or more colour maps. The Handbook has to be consulted as a reference book, whereas the Atlas may be read in chronological order like a history book. It extends from prehistory to the Roman and Byzantine rule in the Near East before the Islamic conquest, although it's especially focused on a time-span reaching the end of the Persian empire. The author's choice of such a long timeframe is explained in the introduction, together with the geographical horizon considered. Here, too, the author decided to widen the area under study from the Aegean to the Indus valley, including Egypt, mainly in order to show the connections with other Asiatic countries and regions. With such chronological and geographical boundaries, this Atlas also becomes a useful tool for biblical and classical scholars.
The topics treated in each chapter may be connected with a polity (e.g. chapter 20, “The Old Babylonian kingdom”), an area (chapter 18 “The Diyala region”), economics (chapter 7, “Trade and mineral resources”), a war (chapter 33, “Hittites and Egyptians in conflict”, with a map of the battle of Qadesh), the evidence from an archive (“The Syro-Palestinian states attested in the Amarna letters”) or even from a single inscription (chapter 27, “The adventures of Idrimi”). I think such an arrangement has to be welcomed, because our knowledge of Near Eastern history and geography is dependent on evidence derived from single excavations and archives covering each a limited time-span and geographic area. At the end of each chapter the reader finds a limited basic bibliography, frequently consisting of just a reference to a PPAWA entry.
As for the maps, there are instances where one feels the need for more topographical details (rivers and mountain chains) and for different fonts for modern and ancient names. For instance, in the map of the “Mitannian Empire” (p. 123), toponyms like Tarsus (classical and modern name, instead of Bronze Age Tarsha), Emar (second millennium place name), Carchemish (traditional spelling of the ancient place name Karkamish) and tel Brak (modern name of an archaeological site) are all presented together and are not graphically differentiated. In the same way, one must bear in mind that in many cases maps could contain suggested positions of ancient place-names together with sure ones. It happens particularly in the case of Late Bronze Age Anatolia (chapters 23, 24), where the geographical reconstruction depends on the evidence from the Hittite texts. In some instances (pp. 114–5) the data needs updating, such as, for example, the location of Nerik at Oymaağaç, which is now confirmed, whereas Samuha should be placed downstream of the indicated position, at the archaeological site of Kayalıpınar. The position on the maps of other place names depends instead on the “mainstream” reconstruction of western Anatolian geography (with Apasa at Ephesus, Millawata at Miletus and Wilusa at Troy), which must still be considered a speculative one.
The historical geography of the ancient Near East has grown increasingly popular with students in recent years, as it is shown in the number of new works that could not be included in the Atlas’ bibliography. Among them, I would recommend the following to scholars interested in further investigating specific topics: M. Weeden and L.Z. Ullman (eds), Hittite Landscape and Geography (Leiden: Brill, 2017), with contributions by historical/philological and archaeological specialists in each area of Bronze Age Anatolia; G. Barjamovic, A Historical Geography of Anatolia in the Old Assyrian Colony Period (CNIP 38, Copenhagen, 2011) – a very rich reference book with maps, based also on unpublished evidence; and N. Ziegler and A.-I. Langlois, Les toponymes paléo-babyloniens de la Haute-Mésopotamie (SEPOA, Paris, 2016), which updates the third volume of the Répertoire géographique des textes cunéiformes (Wiesbaden, 1980).
To conclude, I believe the author has fulfilled his purpose, providing a rich and useful source of information for students of the ancient Near East, as well as students whose interests lie in the classical civilizations and more generalist readers. However, I would recommend that readers consult the Atlas jointly with PPAWA.
