“The SBL Handbook of Style is precisely what is needed for the next generation or two or three of scholars in our field and for everybody in the chain from author to editor to printer, including all the half steps in between. I hope that The Handbook will draw together everybody who publishes in this field to agree to adopt it as the bible for publishing scholarly works in our discipline. having a uniform standard, and a detailed exposition of the rules and the whys and the wherefores of this intricate business, will go a long way toward clarifying and simplifying the work of both writer and reader of these erudite products. I could not be more enthusiastic about a volume that I can recommend to one and all, and to which I can send innocent, ignorant, and recalcitrant authors and editors, and all the rest.” ? David Noel Freedman, Professor of History, and Chair in Hebrew Biblical Studies, University of California, San Diego

“The SBL Handbook of Style is an astonishing book, a true ?one-stop? reference for authors preparing manuscripts in biblical studies and related fields. It covers an amazing range of topics, from what every literate scholar should know (but may not) to what only the most erudite expert in an obscure subfield of the discipline would be likely to know. Do you need to know how to cite an Internet publication? Whose job it is to prepare the index and secure permissions? How to alphabetize Abraham ibn Ezra (and why)? What the abbreviation of AAeg stands for? It’s all here. This volume should substantially reduce the incidence of tears and tantrums that so often beset the process of manuscript preparation. Before long biblical scholars will wonder how we ever got along without this indispensable reference work. Every graduate program should make The SBL Handbook of Style a required text.” ? Carol A. Newsom, Professor of Old Testament, Emory University

SBL Handbook of Style
Patrick H. Alexander, Kutsko, Ernest, Decker-Lucke
ISBN156563487X
Price: $24.95

Publication Date: April, 2003

Available at the SBL Website.

I’m quoting Charles Halton from awilum.com, who got the quote from a friend – just spreading the good words :

Scholars of Ugaritic and Bible should continue to insist on a rigorous knowledge of primary sources even as the discipline engages recently developed methods. . . . . By the same token, the research of specialists or nonspecialists alike legitimately deserves criticism if it does not exhibit knowledge of primary sources. A field lacking basic professional standards is by definition not professional, and failure to invoke such standards surrenders its identity as an arena for rigorous research. (page 223)

Untold Stories
The Bible and Ugaritic Studies in the Twentieth Century

by Mark S. Smith
Hendrickson Publishers, 2001
252 pages, English
Cloth
ISBN: 1565635752
List Price: $29.95
Your Price: $22.46
www.eisenbrauns.com/item/SMIUNTOLD

Zainab Bahrani’s book Women of Babylon. Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia. (2001) is an elegantly formulated and provocative introduction to postmodernist theory and methodology, and their possible application to Ancient Near East Studies.

One doesn’t have to agree with her analysis in detail to be dazzled and delighted by the possibilities and new insights her approach offers.  I take as an example the chapter on “Ishtar: The embodiment of tropes” (p. 141). Bahrani states: “In this chapter, I shall focus on the goddess Ishtar in order to explore her place within Mesopotamia’s cultural order. In doing so I shall diverge from the traditional reading of mythology as narrative tales, and a literary reading of hymns and prayers as poetry. Instead, I shall consider the cultural meanings and values embodied in the figure of Ishtar. Because mythology is an important aspect of cultural signifying systems, I shall analyse Ishtar as a part of this system of signs. […] The methods I rely upon here derive from poststructuralist semiotic and reception theory.”

Her analysis of Ishtar as „truly all woman“, as seductress or femme fatale (p. 144) and her arguments against the goddess being androgynous, bisexual or hermaphrodite I find attractive, and they seem to be not implausible.  It should be, however, checked against and substantiated with contemporary documents and archaeological artefacts. Is the “femme fatale” a notion that would translate into Ancient Near Eastern thought patterns, cultural concepts and models, gender roles? Totally implausible, on the other hand, I find her conclusion that: „ As the goddess that represents all that is unruly, unpredictable, and marginal in Mesopotamian society she stands for what is unstable or outside the accepted forms of behaviour. She is Mesopotamian culture’s figure of the chaotic and marginal and as such is a figure of the chaotic and marginal and as such is a figure of alterity or otherness, an otherness that stands for what is different from the norm: civilised man.” Surely, “civilised woman” would be a norm too? Moreover, “Mesopotamian society” is a very vague and large description. The thousand-year-long evolution of the figure of Inana/Ishtar – with marked character changes and different emphasis on contradictory aspects of her character – and the likewise long history of Ancient Mesopotamia are being ignored here, just as the fact that the position of women in different historical phases and/or places was vastly different.
This seems to me to be going too far in applying – without substantiation – modern western values and especially 20th Century feminist concepts to the Mesopotamian world and culture. The esoteric Lacanian analysis that follows does nothing to clarify this position.

Women of Babylon is a splendid and inspiring introduction to feminist theory & other modern theoretical and methodological debates, and how they could be applied to Ancient Near Eastern Studies. The application and detailed analysis is and will be an important task for ANE scholars.

Zainab Bahrani is Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology, Director of Graduate Studies.

The Agade List is a source of news run by Jack Sasson on a regular listserver. It covers the whole ANE.

To subscribe send a blank email to listserv@unc.edu, and write (as subject and in first line): subscribe agade

Clifford Geertz: Thick Description. Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
Die dichte Beschreibung. Über Zwinkern und Zucken – und Schildkröten.

In my search for Good-Looks, the handsome playboy who was treated so harshly by Ereshkigal, I stumbled upon Desire, discord and Death. Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Myth., by Neal Walls.
His approach to the ancient Near East myths is pleasantly refreshing, and I was excited to learn about the new approaches in Ancient Near East studies, and hopefully likewise in Biblical studies. The old approach was as dry as sand, most of the time, not to mention (religiously) biased and sometimes hideously racistic.

I quote from the foreword:

“For most of the twentieth century, the traditional curriculum of Near Eastern studies emphasized the technical methods of archaeology, history, and philology but neglected the fields of anthropology, comparative religion, and literary theory. As a result, Near Eastern scholars were often unfamiliar with current methods in the academic studies of myth. Many scholars adopted out-of-date interpretative approaches, such as euhemerism, nature-myth, or myth-ritual approaches; others adopted overly romantic perspectives toward the ancient world and attributed a prelogical, mythopoetic mentality to practitioners of “ancient “fertitlity religions”. (…) While earlier generations of Near Eastern scholars did brilliant work in philology, history, and the production of critical editions, they did not always have the same high standards or appropriate methods for sensitive interpretations of mythological literature. Recently, however, scholars have begun to cross disciplinary lines in order to apply contemporary forms of literary and symbolic criticism to the world’s oldest mythology. Indeed, the need for scholars of ancient Near Eastern literatures to break out of their self-imposed isolation and engage critical literary theory is now openly acknowledged within the guild.”

“… the complexity of mythological literature compels me to employ a complex set of methods in order to expoit more fully the surplus of meanings produced by ancient Near Eastern mythological narratives. I apply a variety of methods in order to explore the texts as examples of sophisticated literature and symbolic discourse, to unpack their poetics, and to emphasize literary features not adequately appreciated by previous interpreters. I borrow this idea from literary criticism, that perspective from psychoanalysis, and the other notion from ideological criticism in order to offer new readings of very ancient myths. These contemporary reading strategies ask new questions of both the reader and the text and so open up new vistas of meaning; they cast a new light on the ancient texts and illumine neglected facets of their discourse.”

The result of these methods are four highly interesting, refreshing, thought-provoking essays.

Neal Walls. Desire, Discord and Death: Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Myth (ASOR Books). The book can be downloaded (as pdf) here, and can be ordered here.

The perfectly Manly Man, I think, according to Harvey Mansfield as well as Immanuel Kant. Soldier, traveller, scholar & inspired decipherer of cuneiform – the man who resurrected unsuspected ancient cultures we would never have heard about Inana’s civilisation.

From 1827 Henry Rawlinson – fearless soldier, sportsman and imperial adventurer – spent twenty-five years in India, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan in the service of the East India Company. Among his passions were history, languages and buying books. In 1833 he was chosen to go to Persia because of his excellent knowledge of Persian. It was in Persia that he became obsessed with cuneiform, the world’s earliest writing. The key to understanding cuneiform was an immense inscription high on a sheer rock face in the mountains of western Iran. Only Rawlinson had the physical and intellectual skills, courage, self-motivation and opportunity to make the perilous ascent and copy the monument – an enormous Rosetta Stone – and make important contributions to the decipherment of the three languages and the three cuneiform scripts it was written in: Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite.

Like a Boy’s Own adventure serial … a Victorian Indiana Jones’
[Telegraph, July 2003]

When Rawlinson first went to Persia, cuneiform was barely understood, although a German, Georg Grotefend, had made a useful attempt to work out the meaning of the signs. Rawlinson had the good fortune to be posted to Kermanshah in the west of Iran, just a few miles from a rock-cut monument at Bisitun. On the rock face of the Bisitun mountain, the Persian king Darius the Great had ordered a huge inscription to be carved, with the same message written in three different languages and three different cuneiform scripts. After the monument was completed, Darius ordered all access to it to be quarried away, so nobody could reach it and deface it. It was far too difficult for anyone to climb, until the intrepid Rawlinson came along. With nerves of steel, he repeatedly climbed up to the monument, copying at his peril the enormous inscription, which in the end gave him the key to deciphering two of the languages, Babylonian and Old Persian – King Darius’s newly invented cuneiform – and greatly helped with the third, Elamite.

“Henry Rawlinson was hanging by his arms, watched in horror by his two companions. What had stopped him plunging to his death was the grip of his hands on the remaining length of wood that bridged the gap in the ledge – the ledge beneath the great cuneiform inscription cut into the side of a mountain at Bisitun in Persia. …
read more>>

In 1844 Rawlinson accepted a posting to Baghdad, where he remained for twelve years. Apart from his diplomatic duties, he made two expeditions back into Persia to copy more of the Bisitun monument, and also continued his cuneiform decipherment work, making many discoveries while based in the British Residency at Baghdad by the Tigris river. Also in Baghdad he made the acquaintance of Austen Henry Layard, who began the very first excavations of the ancient mounds of Mesopotamia, sites like Nineveh and Babylon. These produced many more cuneiform inscriptions, and Rawlinson’s success in decipherment resurrected unsuspected civilizations, revealing intriguing details of everyday life and forgotten historical events. By proving to the astonished Victorian public that people and places in the Old Testament really existed (and that documents and chronicles had survived from well before the writing of the Bible), Rawlinson became a celebrity and assured his own place in history.

[…] a small, elderly man by the name of Ya qub. […] he had been employed in the Residency all his life, and [that] of all the Consuls-General whom he had served he respected and loved and admired Rawlinson most of all. In knowledge and learning he was, he said, “like God,” as a horseman he was like Antar [an Arab hero], as a king he was like Nimrod, and when he spoke at the Mijlis (i.e. Town Council) of Baghdad the heart of the Wali Pasha melted, and the knees of his councillors gave way under them.
Ya qub related to Budge numerous stories of Rawlinson. Each year, he said, his power in the country became stronger, and “towards the end of his time here had he taken one dog, and put his English hat on his head and sent him to the Serai, all the people in the bazar would have made way for him, and bowed to him, and the soldiers would have stood still and presented arms to him as he passed, and the officials in the Serai would have embraced him; and if he had sent another dog with another of his hats across the river to Kazimen, the Shi ites and Sunnites would have stopped fighting each other, and would have asked him to drink coffee with them.«
Budge, 1920, pp 231-2 & p. 232

Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon (© 2003) by Lesley Adkins is published in the UK in paperback by Harper Perennial, and in hardcover in the US and Canada by Thomas Dunne Books (an imprint of St Martin’s Press).
Empires of the Plain Website: http://www.adkinshistory.com/empiresoftheplain.aspx
Order the book: Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon