Ancient Ammon.

• Author: Routledge, Bruce
• Position: Reviews of Books

Ancient Ammon. Edited by BURTON MACDONALD and RANDALL YOUNKER. Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East, vol. 17. Leiden: BRILL, 1999. Pp. vii + 247, illus. HFI 160, $94.50.

Ancient Ammon is a collection of eleven papers that had its origin in an ASOR annual meeting. Collection is the operative word, since this volume focuses on the research of the individual authors and contains no introductory or concluding chapters.

The papers included are: R. Younker, "Review of Archaeological Research in Ammon"; [empty set]. LaBianca, "Salient Features of Iron Age Tribal Kingdoms"; B. MacDonald, "Ammonite Territory and Sites"; G. London, "Central Jordanian Ceramic Traditions"; M. Najjar, "'Ammonite' Monumental Architecture"; P. M. Daviau, "Domestic Architecture in Iron Age Ammon"; Kh. Yassine, "Burial Customs and Practices in Ancient Ammon"; W. Aufrecht, "The Religion of the Ammonites"; W. Aufrecht, "Ammonite Texts and Language"; R. Younker, "The Emergence of the Ammonites"; and L. Herr, "The Ammonites in the Late Iron Age and Persian Period."

Rather than summarize each paper, it is perhaps more useful to evaluate the collective contribution in relation to the uses readers are likely to make of the book. As a reference source: this is perhaps the strongest aspect of Ancient Amman, as most of the contributions include a good bibliography and consistently refer to new work, including much that is in press. The authors are all prominent in the field and have each made major contributions to the study of Ammon or are currently engaged in work that promises such contributions. The best indication of the resource value of this book is that my own interest was most strongly piqued by papers on topics I follow less closely. Others with different interests will surely also find that the papers provide a good entree to recent literature.

As a source of new data: here the contribution of Ancient Ammon is more mixed. New data are certainly presented, and other data re-presented in a newly convenient form. However, these new data are largely presented as decontextualized examples, and so Ancient Ammon cannot be consulted in lieu of fuller publication elsewhere. For example, M. Najjar presents some exciting evidence from his excavations at Khilda (previously available only in Arabic; see ADAJ 36: 420-29) and the Amman Citadel (including photographs of an unpublished proto-Aeolic capital and column base), but we are not given much in the way of...