Das syro-hethitische Grabdenkmal.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Book Review

By DOMINIK BONATZ. Mainz: VERLAG PHILIPP VON ZABERN, 2000. Pp. vi + 232, plates. DM 118.

Funerary monuments are the most striking, and indeed characteristic, material remnants of the "Neo-Hittite" successor states of early Iron Age Syria. Stelae and free-standing statues depicting the dead are known from the tenth through the eighth centuries B.C., and from a geographic area stretching from coastal northern Syria to inland Syria and southeastern Anatolia.

The present book is the revision of a 1997 doctoral dissertation completed under Thomas Beran at Berlin's Freie Universitat. Its author was able to make good use of the scholarly Nachla[beta] of J. Voos, who had done much valuable work on this artistic genre before his early death. Approximately one hundred monuments and fragments are considered in this study, and all are documented in excellent photographs. The catalogue in chapter III.1 compiles relevant information concerning find-spots, measurements, previous studies, etc., making this volume a comprehensive presentation of the corpus of Syro-Hittite funerary art.

In his methodological chapter II, Bonatz announces his adherence to E. Panofsky's "iconological" approach, which he helpfully explicates in a few pages. Basically, iconology "views the work of art as a symptom of a period, a culture, and a society" (p. 6), and attempts to reconstruct the Weltanschauung standing behind it, "in order to bring the work of art back to life" (p. 8). This task is carded out through a careful description of the representation on the monument (Phanomenologie), followed by the abstraction of its contents (Ikonographie), culminating in a comprehensive interpretation (Ikonologie). Comparisons are then made with similar objects in earlier, contemporary, and later cultures with the goal of isolating the particular meaning and function of the work within its native civilization.

Bonatz follows these steps with admirable perspicacity, adding to the catalogue already mentioned: 1) translations of the hieroglyphic, cuneiform, and West Semitic texts accompanying many of the monuments (for which he is largely dependent on the work of others), and 2) a collection of comparanda, including four items from Mesopotamia, four from Phoenicia and its diaspora, two from ancient Israel, three from Palmyra, two from...