To overcome the etymological impasse caused by the numerous Greek words of non-Indo-European pedigree, the solution favoured by cranks and Orientalists has long been to assume substantial interferences with the westernmost components of Afroasiatic. Once a sturdy shield wall, E. Masson's Recherches sur les plus anciens emprunts sémitiques en grec (1967) stands in urgent need of revision; G. Bai, Semitische Lehnwörter im Altgriechischen (2009), was a failure (A. Bourguignon, Les emprunts sémitiques en grec ancien. Étude méthodologique et exemples mycéniens [2011], pp. 67–71), while R. Beekes and L. van Beek, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (2010), shirks from recognising as Semitic all but the most conspicuous loanwords and Wanderwörte, for fear this would chip away at the authors' vindication of an Aegean Pre-Greek substrate.
The adventurous spirit of R. makes him double Masson's sum of loans: he admits 65 Semitic borrowings as secure (pp. 21–111), plus another fifteen as likely (pp. 133–52). Weak cases such as the ones buttressed for ἀσκός, pp. 24–6 (arbitrary), ἑρμηνεύς, pp. 38–40 (possible but difficult), or κόφινος, pp. 52–3 (R.'s twist on an old canard of Lewy's: Fremdwörter, p. 115), at once demonstrate an unsteady judgement with respect to what must be deemed a certain loanword. Equally striking are the marks of insufficient revision. None of the early borrowings unnoticed by Masson exists for R.: from Akkadian, ἀλαζών (R. Drew Griffith and R.D. Marks, Phoenix 65 [2011], 23–38, notably 26ff.); from Egyptian, ἔρπις (H.N. Barakat and N. Baum, Douch II [1992], pp. 75–6; G. Schade, Lykophrons ‘Odyssee’ [1999], pp. 21–2; Nardelli, Aristarchus antibarbarus. Pseudologies mésopotamiennes, bibliques, classiques [2012], p. lx note) or κῖκι, κίκι (A.B. Lloyd, Herodotus Book II. Commentary, 1–98 [1976], p. 380; W. Vycichl, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue copte [1983], p. 74; Beekes-van Beek, p. 695); etc. Persian loans in -κη(ς) fare badly as well: ἀκινάκης is rejected, δανάκης and μανιάκης are left out, καυνάκης deemed ‘ursprünglich … wohl iranischer Herkunft’ (p. 140). The 311 lexemes whose Semitic pedigree R. did not find it in himself to validate fill a disappointing chapter (pp. 155–215). It includes words of demonstrably Anatolian origin yet overlooks old enigmas with intriguing claims to being Semitic: we encounter ἄναξ, p. 160 (Nardelli, ‘Black Athena Fades Away: a Consideration of Martin Bernal's Linguistic Arguments’, Exemplaria Classica 17 [2013], 296 n. 46), or χορδή, p. 214 (Aristarchus antibarbarus, p. 182 n. 1), but neither μάκαρ nor σῖτος (Aristarchus antibarbarus, pp. 198–9 n. 10, 200–5). Save for ἐλέφας, κακκάβη, κυπάρισσος, μαργαρίτης and σινδών, all the treatment these putative borrowings receive is the barest string of secondary references, providing no clue as to why they are rejected (was R.'s scepticism about σινδών conditioned by the chronological hiatus with the Akkadian attestations of √SDN?). Finally, data that could be game-changers ought not to have been missed: apropos of ῥόμβος, p. 203, the Ugaritic arbʽ, ‘four’, possibly conceals a vocalised *r(a/ə)ba c (J. Tropper, Ugaritische Grammatik [2000], p. 202c) which elegantly provenances the name of the lozenge (cf. ῥυβόν and the Aramaic of Zincirli rb c y = /rub c ay/, ‘(vier) Viertel’: Tropper, Die Inschriften von Zincirli [1993], pp. 134, 276).
Beekes-van Beek disqualify themselves by casting irresponsible doubts on obvious borrowings (γαυλός, κάδος, χιτών …) and by missing the Semitic ring of too many of their Pre-Greek remnants (R., pp. 26–8 [ἄσφαλτος]; 32–4 [γρύψ]; 35–6 [δάκτυλος]; 44–6 [κάννα, κανών]; 105–7 [χιτών]; or 144–5 [κῆβος]). It is often impossible to decide on internal grounds who seems more likely to be right in those instances where R. and Masson (or Bai) are at odds and the evidence remains ambiguous or has not increased in the meantime. I for one see little to discriminate between some of the Semitic loans R. admits, albeit cautiously (e.g. σαγήνη, pp. 82–4, paying no heed to what the Cyprian gloss ἄγανα tells us [M. Egetmeyer, Le dialecte grec ancien de Chypre (2010), I, pp. 182–3, 216, 217, 218], or σάλπιγξ, on 85–6, ignorant of R. Ghirshman, L'Iran et la migration des Indo-Aryens et des Iraniens [1977], pp. 17–18, 30–2), and cases where he preferred to err on the side of caution (σινδών, p. 205: M. Masson, Matériaux pour l'étude des parallélismes sémantiques [1999], pp. 179–82; F. Quinsat, Arabica 54 [2007], 144–7). R. has good qualities of his own. Although Phoenician data remain pivotal for him too, he surpasses E. Masson and Bai by his refusal to argue mostly on the basis of Hebrew cognates (Bourguignon, p. 197: ‘je veux à tout prix éviter de laisser croire que l'hébreu suffit à lui seul à prouver l'existence d'un étymon sémitique’). His attention to the morphophonemic transformations of Semitic into Greek is similarly unrivalled; each secure loan has such ‘Bemerkungen’ in telegraphic style. Yet he lags far behind Masson by his refusal to write footnotes and a flimsy concern for the distribution of Greek lexemes; and even if one could condone the exclusion of Cohen's Dictionnaire des racines sémitiques ou attestées dans les langues sémitiques (1994 sqq.), R.'s utter lack of engagement with Semitic roots is jarring and smacks of limited competence.
In fact, his monograph stops shorter than Bai's of being a systematic study of the phenomenon of borrowing from the Semitic Levant and Middle East. It has no methodology to speak of (R. Cavenaille, Le latin d'Égypte et son influence sur le grec [1948], pp. 123–36; Bourguignon, pp. 143–206), except perhaps a quest for phonological congruence, which is not the best criterion as it cannot tell apart loanwords from looks-alike. For example, the enigmatic ἄωτος, whose semantic shift from Homer to Pindar remains unsettled (pace R.A. Raman, Glotta 53 [1975], 195–201, 205), seems to be poetic rather than technical (M.S. Silk, Interaction in Poetic Imagery [1974], pp. 239–240, versus E.K. Borthwick, JHS 96 [1976], 1); instead of relating it to the notion of ‘bloating’ (Supplement to Chantraine, DELG², p. 1383), R.'s habitus would favour a linkage with the Old Assyrian awītum, viz. the price / value of goods converted into monetary metal (F.R. Kraus, Revue d'Assyriologie 73 [1979], 141), through *ἄϜωτος. Of course, this proves nothing beyond a neat phonetic match and a semantic one which is a stretch; likewise most of R.'s additions to Masson's loanwords. There is a frustrating amount of illusory simplifications as well. Replacing analysis by doxography, he lists everything he has read, quotes extensively from the pundits, and with such juxtaposition of raw pieces he deems the job adequately done. The vocalic questions raised by the borrowings were not considered (p. 222), no matter how much the vocalisation of Ugaritic progressed lately. R.'s lack of interest in the graphic aspects of cuneiform has him juggling the conventional Akkadian lemmata of our lexica, as if no difference existed between a lexeme written logographically, viz. stabilised by a scribal code, and another one spelled syllabically or with rare values (B. Powell, Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature [2002], pp. 44, 46; M. Worthington, Principles of Akkadian Textual Criticism [2012], pp. 58–60). Nor does R. consider finer points, like complications of folk-etymology or false analogy in Greek, and the bowdlerisation or misconstruction of the root value(s) of a Semitic vocable once borrowed (for σεμίδαλις < Akkadian samīdu, pp. 89–90, see R. Sallares, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World [1991], pp. 316–26 at 317–19).
Finally, the decision to stick to the most mainstream lexica and handbooks at the expense of Spezialforschung prevents the work from conveying an adequate idea of ancient Near Eastern lexicography (compare ‘Black Athena Fades Away’, pp. 285–300). R.'s grasp of West Semitic suffers from his ignoring Halayqa's Comparative Lexicon of Ugaritic and Canaanite (2008), Krahmalkov's Phoenician-Punic Dictionary (2000) and Tropper's Grammatik; he fails to control the data culled from the oldest parts of the CAD and Akkadisches Handwörterbuch, missing even the Concise Dictionary of Akkadian (2000²); he should not have supplemented the Erman-Grapow Wörterbuch with the wildly inaccurate Großes Handwörterbuch Ägyptisch-Deutsch by Hannig (better Faulkner's dictionary; Hannig's Ägyptisches Wörterbuch [2003 sqq.]; Takács' Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian [1999 sqq.]); Iranian, Hebrew and Arabic are weakly sourced (what of the Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum? the TWAT / TDOT? Clines's Dictionary of Classical Hebrew? Zammit's Comparative Lexical Study of Qur'ānic Arabic [2002]? Corriente's Arabic dictionaries?); he favours one Einzelquelle for languages as arcane as Sumerian and Kartvelian.
