Review: [untitled] Author(s): Nathan Wasserman Reviewed work(s): Altbabylonische Rechts- und Verwaltungsurkunden aus dem Musée du Louvre by Daniel Arnaud Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 115, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1995), pp. 534535 Published by: American Oriental Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/606266 Accessed: 13/12/2008 14:54 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aos. 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Nevertheless, here, as elsewhere, it is affirmedthat palaeographyis a sound basis for historical reconstruction.But the contraryargumentis advanced on p. 142, where the hypothesis that posits the invention of sexagesimal place notation in the Ur III Period is rejected because it "rests on paleographic criteria"! The real merit of this little volume, like its German predecessor [reviewed in JAOS 114 (1994): 659-61], is that it illustrates as does no other work how computer technology can be applied to the problems of our profession. We owe this to the fortuitous circumstance that this group of scholars came together in Berlin and were able to acquire the means to carry out their work on the archaic tablets from Uruk. Most worthy of the attention of Assyriologists is the documentation for the current possibilities and limitations of electronically generated cuneiform copies. As the authors rightly emphasize in their concluding chapter, the traditionalAssyriological method of drawing copies by hand poses many problems (more even than they mention). No hand copy can be a perfect reproductionof the original manuscript, and all are subject to hazards that are essentially unpredictable. Reliable electronically generated copies are of potentially revolutionary significance, first because of the possibility of reducing the "scribal error"factor. Second, it is significant because it seems rather likely that, eventually, informationcan be stored electronically either directly from photos or from computer assisted "copies" of cuneiform texts made from photos or directly from the tablet by scanning. It is, therefore, well to take stock of where we are in this process. Comparison of photos and computer assisted copies (such juxtapositions appear on pp. 37, 39, 40f., 44f., 114f.) shows clearly that the era of hand copying is drawing to a close, even if it has not quite gotten there yet. A striking example of the still existing gap can be seen in how much stylized convention and interpretationis present in the computer assisted copies, as opposed to what one can actually see on the photos. This also applies to the conventionalized striations indicating breaks in the tablet. Occasionally, strokes clearly visible on the photo are not reproduced in the copy; the "heads" of strokes are frequently more pronounced on the photo than in the copy; and representation of numeral notation is highly conventional in the copies (differing in this respect little from hand copies, except that the computer assisted copies are at least regular). There are many other small details of this type that merit the study of Assyriologists seriously interested in palaeography. Thanks and praise to our three colleagues in Berlin who authored this provocative little book and to all the institutions and individuals who have made this worthwhile project possible! MARVINA. POWELL NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY Altbabylonische Rechts- und Verwaltungsurkundenaus dem ARNAUD. Berliner Beitrage zum Musee du Louvre. By DANIEL VERREIMER VorderenOrient, Texte, vol. 1. Berlin: DIETRICH LAG,1989. Pp. 18, 63 plates, 1 loose errata sheet. DM 48 (paper). In the first volume of the BBVO series, the author-known mainly for his copious publications and studies of Emar textsoffers 176 copies of Old Babylonian texts located at the Louvre. Many of the texts are fragmentaryor written in a very cursive ductus, facts which explain the occasional difficulties in reading some of the autographs. The author surely merits the reader's thanks for struggling with such a variety of genres and periods: administrative,economic, and legal texts, as well as letters from early to late Old Babylonian periods. It is only to be regretted that most of the texts (excepting nos. 160 and 176) are reproduced without their framing lines, an absence which hinders the readerfrom getting an immediately clear idea of the tablets'general shape and physical characteristics. The lack of line numbering in the margins is a furtherinconvenience to the reader. The copies are prefaced by a catalogue supplying basic details, such as each tablet's measurements, its sender's name, and the date, if known. The catalogue is not free of misprints, and the added errata page corrects the most obvious of them. Disturbing as they are, such unavoidable slips should not be too harshly criticized. It is rather the lack of indices which makes the utilization of the present volume toilsome. Prosopographic compilations are by now clearly indispensable tools for the reconstruction of original archives and their onomastica. Thus, primary indices (i.e., PN, DN, GN, and basic key-words) cannot be considered as superfluous addenda, and a catalogue, exhaustive as it may be, cannot replace them. Since the economic and administrativetexts-the majorbulk of the present work-have been reviewed elsewhere,1 I would focus here on some of the Old Babylonian letters which are included in this volume. Collation of these tablets allows for the following short remarks.2 No. 15, 1. 5: as copied; 1. 7: fourth sign: ru*. / le*-qeNo. 16, 1. 6: riq*l-ti-a-ma; 11.11-14: rit*-ti LU.MES ni-im-ma / [i ]d*-na-ni-im-ma I [li?-i ]6-mu-tu-rnim*]. No. 17, 11. 4-5: ra*'-wi-lam / Ui*'-nu*-ma a-sa-pa-rrala[m?]; 1. 9: first sign after the break: LU??;11. 15-24: d?AMAR?-UTU?-si-li [Xl / rl as-sa-ti-su / bi-ri-im-su- ma/ra-nal a-li-i[m] / ta-rru*'-su* / i-na an-ni-tim / awi-lu-ut-ka / a-ma-a[r] / la te-gi / a-pu-tum. No. 18, 1. 8: pi-qi-[d]am; 11.10-22: rpi-iq-dal-ma / su-ni-iqsu-nu-ti-ma / is-ka-ra-ti-su-nu / e-ri-ig-su-nu-ti-ma / 1 S. Dalley, Or. 61 (1992): 324-25; E. Woestenburg,BSOAS 56 (1993): 127ff. D. 0. Edzard, ZA 83 (1993): 299ff.; and D. Charpin, RA 88 (1994): 78ff. 2 My thanks go to B. Andr6-Salvini, Mus6e du Louvre, for her ready assistance in collating these texts-among other Old Babylonian letters-during the summer of 1994. 535 Reviews of Books is-tu ne-ba-6a-tim / qd-at-na-tim/ re-ed-dam / i ka-apra-rtiml / at-ta i li-pi-it-eS4-tdr/ su-ni-qd-a-ma / i-na GIl-PISAN / ku-un-ka-ni-im-ma / Fu-bi-la-ni-im. (For nebebum, see recently N. Ziegler, Mem. Birot, 15-16.) No. 160, 11. 4-5: dUTU mu-sar-kam! li-ba-li-it-ka aS?-um LU.JUN.GA;1. 19: wu-us-Si-ra*-aS-Su;1. 22: se-a-am am-rta*'-da-ad; 1. 25: a1-rta* -ka-an-mi; 1. 29: a-tarar-dam*l-ma. No. 174,1. 8: a-na na-sa-rbil-im u sa-ka-nim*; 1. 10: na-sahu u Sa-ka-nu; 1. 19: a*-wi*-le-e ta-ad-da-al-pa* (last sign left uncopied); 1. 23: tu-da*-ba*-ba* a-wi-le-e tada-al-p[a?]. No. 176, 11.1-12: a-na ba-le-e-ra-[af] / qi-bi-[ma] / um-ma qi-iS-tum-ma/ dUTU li-ba-al-li-it-ka / as-sum Se-e-em / sa ta-aS-pu-ra-am/ mi-im-ma la ta-ta-na-as-Sa-aS-fi / ur-ra-am Sum-ma msi-li-dgu-la / Sum-ma a-na-ku-u / ni*(over an erased il})-il-la-kam-ma / rse-a-aml [(?)] rFa?lqd?-le-e-tim/nu-xl-[o-(o)]-rarl-Sa. (The tablet is in fact comprised of two fragments, which join in the break after line 11.) Taken as a whole, this volume contains many interesting texts which deserve full editions and further study. D. Arnaud is to be warmly thanked for publishing this varied lot of Old Babylonian texts, thus enlarging our knowledge of the period. NATHAN WASSERMAN THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY Third-MillenniumLegal and Administrative Texts in the Iraq and J. N. POSTGATE. Museum, Baghdad. By P. STEINKELLER Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 1992. Pp. xv + 123, 32 plates. $34.50. This is a handsome and well-edited book, in every respect a pleasure to handle as well as to read. A minor irritantin the layout is the use of horizontal lines to divide the text into sections; especially superfluous are the lines in the transliterations separating obverses and reverses, etc., as they correspond to no such divisions in the contents of the texts. The volume presents "virtually all" the administrativeand legal pre-Ur III texts from illicit excavations held by the IraqMuseum (p. 1), always welcome news. But what does "virtually all" mean? Evidently, the Iraq Museum is no easier to survey than any other large collection. Many years ago, van Dijk kindly entrustedme with the publication of his copy of IM 3239,1 omitted from the present volume, which task I carry out here. 1 Abbreviations follow Rykle Borger, Handbuch der Keilschriftliteratur, vol. II (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter& Co., 1975), xi-xxxii with the following addition: Verso IM 3239 Copy by J. van Dijk The texts are presented in transliterations,translations, and comments, nearly all in beautiful copies as well. The philological partof the work is of the high quality thatwe have come to expect from Steinkeller, and only little can be added to it. However, one misses some non-philological information regarding the texts: what are the measurements,colors, and other physical properties of the tablets? What is the scale of the copies? And does the IM register really have nothing on when, where, how, and from OSP I = Westenholz, Old Sumerianand Old AkkadianTexts in Philadelphia, Chiefly from Nippur. Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, 1 (Malibu: Undena, 1975).