The Fara Tablets in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

• Author: Rubio, Gonzalo
• Position: Book review

The Fara Tablets in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. By HARRIET P. MARTIN, FRANCESCO POMPONIO, GIUSEPPE VISICATO, and AAGE WESTENHOLZ. Bethesda, Md.: CDL PRESS, 2001. Pp. xxvii + 162, plates. $60.

This volume presents the tablets excavated at Fara (ancient Suruppak) by Eric Schmidt in 1931 (nos. 195), which are now at the University of Pennsylvania, along with those purchased by the University Museum between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth (nos. 96-111). The tablets are all edited with copies reproduced in the main text of the book, followed by transliteration, translation, and notes. Photos of most of the texts are included at the end of the volume. Special attention is devoted to the archaeological context of these tablets, in a section that draws from Martin's own earlier volume, Fara: A Reconstruction of the Ancient City of Shuruppak (Birmingham. 1988). Moreover, Visicato completes this picture by proposing a typology of the tablets in regard to the areas in which they were found. For most of them, the specific findspot seems not to have been noted by Schmitt, but rather only the general 10x10 m excavation square. This contextual approach is not limited to the texts from the 1931 excavation but also includes the earlier findings of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft excavations (1902-3), as well as texts purchased in the antiquities market. As expected, the vast majority of the texts date to Early Dynastic IIIa, with a couple of Ur III exceptions (nos. 93-95).

This work clearly intends to go beyond a simple edition, and thus it includes specific topical chapters. Some of these sections constitute small monographs that introduce the reader to the current state of Fara studies: on deities (by Pomponio), on bureaucratic organization (by Visicato), on capacity measurements (by Pomponio and Visicato), and an appendix on the prosopography of all forty-six sale contracts (along with another four related documents) from Fara (by Visicato).

In an early review of this title in JCS 54 (2002): 125-30, R. K. Englund has pointed out...