The volume before us celebrates the achievements of an outstanding scholar, and it does so in a fashion worthy of the celebrand. Over a career lasting, to date, more than forty years, Matthew Stolper has left his mark as one of the pre-eminent expositors in the fields of Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid studies of our age. His Entrepreneurs and Empire, published in 1985, a pioneering study on the operations of the Murašû family in mid-Achaemenid Babylonia, set a new standard in the handling and interpretation of Babylonian economic texts and this has been accompanied by article after article making seminal contributions to the field. Studies on the Kasr archive, on the satrap Belšunu, on the governor of Babylon and Across-the-River, on taxation, on the estates of Mardonius, on Iranian individuals and loan words, and many others, have transformed the face and practice of the discipline. From the beginning Stolper's grounding in Elamite, Akkadian, Aramaic and Old Persian has allowed him to formulate penetrating insights into multitudinous aspects of the Achaemenid empire, and this exceptional breadth is reflected in this excellent volume. After a warm introduction by the editors and a bibliography of the laureate's publications by Charles Jones, a total of twenty contributions from a distinguished selection of the leaders in the field address topics ranging across the Persepolis tablets, sigillography and glyptic, artistic traditions, historical episodes, imperial officers and the evidence of the archaeological record. In more detail, broad historical issues are taken up by Amélie Kuhrt's contribution on the reign of Xerxes, in which she lays out once again the arguments against seeing the king as a destroyer of temples in Babylonia, and by Robert van der Spek's comparison of Achaemenid and Assyrian policies towards subject nations. Piotr Michalowski takes a single sentence from the Cyrus cylinder, which on the surface seems quite matter of fact, and demonstrates how it actually encodes a complex message relating to Cyrus' staking of legitimacy over the erstwhile Assyrian empire through claiming spiritual/moral affinity with Ashurbanipal and at the expense of analogous claims of Nabonidus. Elamite matters are addressed in Michael Kozuh's edition of bricks of Šilhak-Inšušinak and Šutrak-Nahhunte from the site of Bard-e Karegar and the reflections on the path to the underworld by Françoise Grillot-Susini. Piotr Steinkeller reconsiders the evidence for ancient Šimaški, with a new tabulation of the dynasty of Šimaški and an updated discussion of the territory's localisation. The Persepolis administration serves as the base of the contributions of Azzoni and Dusinberre on horse keeping and of Mark Garrison's analysis of inscribed royal seals of Darius I, while Elizabeth Carter's contribution looks at the representation of women in Achaemenid royal art. A number of contributions deal with information deriving from Babylonian archival texts. Among these, Paul-Alain Beaulieu focuses on an event late in the (in any case short) reign of Nebuchadnezzar IV when the gods of Uruk and Larsa were sent to Babylon, closely reminiscent of an incident when the same thing happened in the reign of Nabonidus, and evidently likewise carried out in the face of enemy advancesFootnote ¹ . Caroline Waerzeggers publishes BM 72747 to suggest that a statue of Darius was installed in the Ebabbara temple of Sippar and the recipient of regular offerings. Cornelia Wunsch and Rachel Magdalene discuss aspects of manumission in the Neo-Babylonian period based on archival documents. The article by Jursa and Wagensonner on the estates of Šamaš on the Habur presents new evidence together with a reinterpretation of old evidence to demonstrate that the Ebabbara temple of Sippar had a significant holding of land on the Habur in northeastern Syria, a highly important and rare insight into the very little documented arena of organisation and management in the provinces of the Neo-Babylonian empire. Individual officials are addressed in Walter Farber's paper on the sēpir ša gardu and that of Jan Tavernier on the ustarbaru. On the archaeological front, Rémy Boucharlat presents evidence for a complex of Achaemenid works in the Tang-i Boulagh valley south of Pasargadae including water channels, settlements and an elite pavilion which may have formed part of a paradise. Gil Stein takes as his starting point the analysis of two Achaemenid period graves from the site of Haci Nebi Tepe on the Euphrates in Turkey, leading on to a discussion on the rôle played by the koine of an international portable elite material culture and reflections on the identification of ethnicity through material culture. A number of contributions deal with matters relating outside of the first millennium or other genres: these include Mogens Trolle Larsen on cultural exchange at Kültepe, Jacob Lauinger on the curricular content of an Old Babylonian prayer from Ur, Martha Roth on Old Babylonian law, Francesca Rochberg in periodicities on Babylonian celestial sciences, Rubio Gonzalo on the alleged ius primae noctis in Gilgamesh. This is a highly varied and stimulating volume which makes important contributions to a range of fields.