Amarna Studies: Collected Writings.

• Author: Ikeda, Jun
• Position: Book review

Amarna Studies: Collected Writings. By WILLIAM L. MORAN; edited by John Huehnergard and Shlomo Izre'el. Harvard Semitic Studies, 54. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 2003. Pp. xxxi + 363. $44.95.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, there were two centers where one could study the language of the Amarna letters from Canaan ("Amarna linguistics"). One was Harvard University, with William L. Moran as mentor, and the other, Tel Aviv University, under the supervision of Anson F. Rainey. Those who wanted to study the letters seriously had to start by somehow getting hold of Moran's unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, "A Syntactical Study of the Dialect of Byblos as Reflected in the Amarna Tablets" (Johns Hopkins University, 1950), which was unavailable from University Microfilms. In the book under review, this valuable piece of work, together with twenty-six papers that Moran wrote on the Amarna letters, has finally become available to everyone, thanks to scholars representing the two centers, John Huehnergard (Harvard) and Shlomo Izre'el (Tel Aviv). The editors have made the dissertation and the papers even more accessible than the originals by adopting a handsome typeface, converting endnotes to footnotes, and providing indexes of text citations and cross-references among Moran's writings.

The twenty-six papers consist of twenty-two articles and contributions to three encyclopedias and a text anthology (nos. 13, 15, 25, 27). Four of the articles (nos. 2-4) were written before Moran submitted his dissertation, and two of these (nos. 2 and 4) were coauthored with W.F. Albright. The remaining eighteen articles were composed after the dissertation. They shed new light on grammatical (nos. 6-8, 10-12, 16-17), lexical (nos. 9, 19-22, 24), as well as historical issues (nos. 14, 18, 23, 26), based on solid philological evidence from the Amarna letters and/or Western Peripheral Akkadian material. Reading through this book, one will be properly initiated into Amarna linguistics.

The introduction to the dissertation (pp. 5-8) takes the reader back to the first era of Amarna linguistics at the beginning of the twentieth century. One reads (between the lines) that this era was interrupted inter alia by the discovery of the Ugaritic language. It is interesting to see that Moran had to justify his renewed interest in the Amarna letters by emphasizing their contribution to Ugaritic studies (p. 6).

This book epitomizes Moran's achievements in Amarna...