An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion.

• Author: Snell, Daniel C.
• Position: Book review

An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion. By TAMMI J. SCHNEIDER. Grand Rapids, Mich.: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING CO., 2011. Pp. x + 146, illus. $18 (paper).

Tammi Schneider has written an attractive little book that gives an orientation to beginning students of the Hebrew Bible. It probably will not be of use to specialists in the field. Why this seems to be the case is difficult to say. The things I note are certainly not debilitating flaws, and yet, taken in combination, I can say that I wish she had written a different book.

In most of her discussions we do not hear about the evidence. In a book for beginners you cannot explain every bit of evidence behind what you say. But you can explain the background to a couple of important ideas or events. We owe it to beginners to show them that history is not just the facts as we now understand them, but also the process of inquiry (Herodotus's historiai, after all) that leads us to conclusions that last, until modified by new texts and new ways of handling what we have found. This is not just a good story; it is an insight into the generation of knowledge. We have lots of information floating around these days, and unless we can evaluate how it was generated, we may easily be misguided.

Some minor carpings: Schneider states that naditus "spent a great deal of time praying to that deity," but my understanding is that we know nothing at all about their extra-economic activities. In harking back to the heroic period of archaeology she says that the goal frequently was to serve historians, especially those of the Annales school. That journal was only founded in 1929, and it is fair to say that its influence was minimal beyond French medieval history until after World War II.

The Sumerian King List may have been composed as late as the Isin-Larsa period, but there is an Ur III copy that suggests otherwise (P. Steinkeller, "An Ur III Manuscript of the Sumerian King List," in Festschrift fur Claus Wilcke [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003], 267-92), and there are not "about a hundred names of Gutian rulers." There are twenty listed in the Sumerian King List, along with one who "had no name."

Assurbanipal did not build both "a significant library and museum" (p. 33, referring to Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia [1964], 15-18). For museums see P. Calmeyer, "Museum," Realexikon der Assyriologie 8.5/6 (1995): 453-55; there...