"Go to the Land I Will Show You": Studies in Honor of Dwight W. Young.

• Author: Oller, Gary H.
• Position: Review

Edited by JOSEPH COLESON and VICTOR MATTHEWS. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 1996. Pp. xix + 428. $42.50.

This volume honoring Dwight W. Young, who taught ancient Near Eastern languages at Brandeis and Cornell Universities, contains articles by twenty-eight scholars in fields related to biblical studies and ancient Near Eastern history and linguistics. I comment only on several of its twenty-eight contributions.

Using place-names from the Ebla tablets, Michael Astour identifies a number of unrecognized north Syrian locations in New Kingdom Egyptian topographic lists and historical records. He concludes that a large number of published place-names from the Ebla tablets are important for knowledge of the historical toponymy of North Syria and that there was a high degree of survival of those place-names into the Late Bronze Age. See also his "The Toponyms of Ebla," JAOS 117 (1997): 332-38.

Victor Matthews presents a good summary on the roles of messengers in the Mari period. For an overview on messengers in the ancient Near East, see my chapter, "Messengers and Ambassadors in Ancient Western Asia," in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East III, ed. Jack M. Sasson et al. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1995), 1465-73.

Wayne Pitard examines areas where new insights about the relationship of pastoral nomads to urban dwellers have had impact, including the origins of the Arameans living in the middle Euphrates and Habur River valleys in the twelfth century. He concludes that there is no real evidence that the campaigns of Middle Assyrian monarchs against Arameans in the twelfth and eleventh centuries represent an attempt to stop their invasions of Assyria. Instead he suggests that they represented efforts to control the area north and northwest of Assyria to the Euphrates; the Arameans living there may have been part of the Semitic-speaking tribal groups that were there in the second millennium both as pastoralists and urban dwellers.

There has been much recent work on the Arameans, including Helene Sader, "The 12th Century B.C. in Syria: The Problem of the Rise of the Aramaeans," and Thomas L. McClellan, "Twelfth Century B.C. Syria: Comments on H. Sader's Paper," both in The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris, ed. William Ward and Martha Sharp Joukowsky (Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1992), 157-63; 164-73. On Assyrian-Aramean interactions in the twelfth and eleventh centuries, see Amelie Kuhrt, The Ancient...