The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation.

• Author: Podany, Amanda H.
• Position: Book review

The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation. Edited by MARK W. CHAVALAS. Blackwell Sourcebooks in Ancient History. Oxford: BLACKWELL. PUBLISHING, 2006. Pp. xxii + 445. $44.95 (paper).

Mark W. Chavalas has, in recent years, co-edited a number of volumes that seem to share a common goal of bringing recent scholarship on ancient Near Eastern topics to a wider audience. These books include volumes titled New Horizons on Ancient Syria (1992), Mesopotamia and the Bible (2002), and Life and Culture in the Ancient Near East (2003). In these books, Chavalas and his co-editors brought together some of the top ancient Near Eastern scholars and asked them to write for an audience that knows little about their fields. The resulting volumes cover a wide range of topics and are accessible, lively, and interesting. Chavalas, his co-editors, and contributors are to be thanked for their efforts.

Chavalas's newest compilation, titled The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation, continues this admirable tradition. It is, as the title suggests, a sourcebook, but it is also a collection of essays, written by specialists and designed not only to provide students and interested readers with reliable translations of important ancient texts, but also to set those texts in historical and literary context. As Chavalas notes in his acknowledgments, this book addresses what has been a pressing need. Those of us who teach ancient Near Eastern history at the undergraduate level have long been hoping for such a book, to replace J. B. Pritchard's edited two-volume Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton Univ. Press, 1971, 1975, 1992). These books include a wide variety of source material, but many of the translations are out of date, and Pritchard's focus on the Old Testament results in the omission of many important documents that happen not to reflect on the Bible.

Chavalas is unapologetic in choosing to focus in this volume on sources that, almost exclusively, reflect "history from above" (p. 3). Of the 165 separate documents included in the volume (a few of them are grouped together; there are 157 text numbers), 134 were written or commissioned directly by kings or addressed to them. These include royal inscriptions, letters, royal hymns, lists of year names, treaties, annals, royal proclamations, prayers by kings, a royal donation, and a king's testament. The other thirty-one documents are also almost all about...