Assur--Gott, Stadt and Land: 5. Internationales Colloquium des Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, 18.-21. Februar 2004 in Berlin.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Book review

Assur--Gott, Stadt and Land: 5. Internationales Colloquium des Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, 18.-21. Februar 2004 in Berlin. Edited by JOHANNES RENGER. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG. 2011. Pp. xiii + 470. illus. [euro]45.

One of the happy consequences of the Wiedervereinigung of the two Germanys was the establishment of the Assur Project, whose goal is the examination and publication of the totality of finds from the excavations of the original Assyrian capital carried out under the auspices of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft from 1903 through 1914. In February 2004 this same society held a colloquium in Dahlem ( Berlin) to present preliminary reports on the work of the Project. as well as more general accounts of Assyrian history and culture, represented in this volume of proceedings by twenty-four essays--twenty-three in German and one in English. The table of contents is accessible at: http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/dzioartike1/201/003/3947_201.pdf?t=1303970510. I will mention only a selection here.

Most interesting to the historian of Assyriology are the contributions of Johannes Renger situating the work at Assur within the tumultuous history of Germany in the twentieth century and that of Olof Matthes, who reviews the correspondence between excavator Walter Andrae at Assur and his nominal supervisor, Robert Koldewey, digging at Babylon. In these 823 preserved letters, serious matters such as difficulties with the Ottoman antiquities official Osman Hamdi Bey (pp. 27-29) are discussed alongside such ridiculous incidents as the "Hundekackezwischenfall: a blowup occasioned by the misbehavior of Ernst Herzfeld's pet dog (p. 20). Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum also treats comparatively recent material in her consideration of the interpretation of Assyria and its history in the historiography of the nineteenth century C.E. Not surprisingly, as she demonstrates, in that era many scholars drew a contrast between Assyria and Babylonia modeled on that presented in contemporary histories of the classical world between Sparta and Athens.

Somewhat reassuring among all the had news to issue from Iraq in recent years is Walter Sommerfeld's report on contemporary threats to the site of Assur itself and to those of its material remains held by the Baghdad Museum. The collection of tablets--including those recovered in more recent excavations by Iraqi investigators--appears to be safe (p. 83) and Assur itself has sustained no significant damage...