A History of the Animal World in the Ancient Near East.

• Author: Katz, Joshua T.
• Position: Book Review

A History of the Animal World in the Ancient Near East. Edited by BILLIE JEAN COLLINS. Handbook of Oriental Studies, vol. I, 64. Leiden: BRILL, 2002. Pp. xxii + 620, illus. $164.

There is something obviously special about animals. People love, fear, keep, and eat them; they depict them in art, compose stories about them, and invent fantastic new creatures; they endow them with human characteristics and dress up as beasts themselves. No one will dispute the importance of trees and rocks, houses and boats, or cabbages and kings, but fauna are different, providing a mirror of the human in culture after culture, from mundane activities to the most ceremonial ones. This large "handbook" provides a useful introduction to ancient Near Eastern zoology, concentrating on the depiction and use of animals in the art, literature, and broader cultural (especially religious) practices of Anatolia, Egypt, Iran, Mesopotamia, and the Syro-Palestine area. Though not a volume that many will choose to read straight through (and one that few individuals will be able to afford), the book deserves to be widely known. Ably edited by the Hittitologist Billie Jean Collins and supported by a fine index, it will be one of the first places to which scholars will turn when they want to find something out quickly about the Egyptian cult of the Apis bull, the evidence for porcine bones in the Levant, or the status of the ostrich in the Hebrew Bible.

The book is divided into five parts, with a total of seventeen chapters by fourteen authors: I, "The Native Fauna" (which consists of a single paper, Allan S. Gilbert's extraordinarily learned "Native Fauna of the Ancient Near East"); II, "Animals in Art" (five papers); III, "Animals in Literature" (four); IV, "Animals in Religion" (five); and V, "Studies in the Cultural Use of Animals" (two). There is also a short introduction, as well as Gilbert's very useful, sparely annotated "Appendix: Bibliography of Near Eastern Zoology," which overlaps to some extent with the lengthy list of references cited in the volume as a whole. Although there is some cross-referencing, both across topics (note that three of the four authors of papers on literature have papers on religion in the next section) and across languages, each contribution stands alone, perhaps a bit more than is ideal. It is not obvious to me that it was a wise choice to solicit separate chapters on art, literature, and religion and then arrange them into discrete...