House Most High: The Temples of Ancient Mesopotamia.

• Author: Robertson, John F.

By A. R. GEORGE. Mesopotamian Civilizations, 5. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 1993. Pp. xii + 209; 16 plates. $39.50.

This handsomely and very carefully produced volume is, to be sure, not the comprehensive study that one might expect from its title; it does not provide detailed descriptions of the temples of ancient Babylonia and Assyria or anything approaching an analytical treatment of their architectural forms, administrative structures, or social and economic functions. It is, rather, a meticulous, highly competent, extremely valuable work of traditional philology, in which A. R. George has made a significant contribution to the study of the "ceremonial" names of the buildings upon which were centered some of the central institutions of ancient Mesopotamian society.

The book is divided into two major parts. In the introduction to "Part One: The Temple Lists of Ancient Mesopotamia," George states his intention to bring up to date the evidence concerning all the known temple lists. Several of those lists have appeared in recent text editions (for which he provides references), noteworthy among them George's own recent volume, Babylonian Topographical Texts (Louvain, 1992). The temple names with which he principally deals are "ceremonial names" - i.e., those used, as George defines them, "in most royal inscriptions, in hymns and liturgical texts, and in sacred and erudite literature generally" (p. 2, n. 3) - which are to be contrasted with what he assumes were the "everyday" or "popular" names (represented by the usage e/bit DN), which appear in most "secular," including administrative, texts. He cites, however, no evidence to support the assumption that temples were indeed, on the popular level, referred to primarily as, e.g., "Enlil's temple" or "Ishtar's house." The question of the currency of the ceremonial temple names at the "man-in-the-street" level, though perhaps presently unaddressable, involves interesting implications concerning popular awareness of what is assumed to have been esoteric knowledge.

George divides the corpus of temple lists into four chief types: (1) lexical temple lists, comprising principally the "e-lists" in Hh XXI-XXII and Proto-Kagal (for both of which lists he provides brief comments) but also including the previously unpublished GB Isin tablet IM 96881, a possible fragment of Proto-Kagal for which he provides a transliteration and brief discussion; (2) theological temple lists, grouping temples...