Uruk, Architektur IV: Von der Seleukiden- bis zur Sasanidenzeit.

• Author: Downey, Susan B.
• Position: Book Review

2 vols. By ARNO KOSE. Ausgrabungen in Uruk-Warka, Endberichte, vol. 17. Mainz: PHILLIP VON ZABERN, 1998. Pp. xxxii + 661 + 95, plans. DM 380.

This massive, impressive, and handsomely produced volume, based on the author's dissertation, is the fruit of prodigious labor. It is divided into sections, allowing for reading in ever increasing depth. The author begins with an overview of the history and development of the city from the late Achaemenid through the Parthian periods (pp. 1-84). This is not limited to architecture, but includes discussions of the finds from various buildings and of the social structure of the city, particularly in the Seleucid period. This section is followed by detailed documentation of the building remains of the Seleucid and Parthian periods (pp. 85-411) and a short summary (pp. 413-18). There are nine appendices, including a list of stratified finds, detailed measurements of the rooms in various buildings, and keys to plans, profiles, and plates. Helpful glossaries of terms peculiar to the Warka excavations are provided.

The author draws his information from published reports of earlier excavations, as well as from notes, drawings, and plans in the Uruk archives, to create this magisterial synthesis. As is to be expected in a site that has been excavated with some interruptions by the German Archaeological Institute since 1928 and visited earlier by Western scholars such as Loftus, the documentation presents considerable problems. The author outlines these on pp. 87-89, and they will be all too familiar to others who have worked from old excavation records: photographs taken without north arrows, lack of photographs of features that have now disappeared, plans that do not distinguish among various building periods, a zero point that is insufficiently defined. Kose has taken a number of measures to correct for these problems. Numbers have been added to the plates to indicate features discussed in the texts. There are numerous plans, drawings, and stratigraphic profiles, some archival, others redrawn. Harris matrices are provided for the profiles. Every effort is made to enable the diligent reader to sort out the details of each phase of each building.

The book is not especially easy to use, however, for several reasons. Plates and text figures are included in volume 1. Volume 2 is a box of large foldout plans. Some of the profiles are in the text volume, some in the box with the large plans, out of concern for...